9fans archive / 2000 / 11 / 36 /    prev next

From: "rob pike" <rob@pla...>
Subject: [9fans] mash
Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 08:20:28 -0500

We needed a make-like facility in Inferno but I dreaded porting
make or mk.  I had been musing for some time that mk is conceptually
just a special dependency-driven wrapper for shell scripts (this is its
major advance over make, in which the recipes are all mangled and
variables adjusted before the script is run).  It therefore seemed that
a shell with a little extra could provide the ability to write building
scripts as shell scripts.  But I didn't know how to do it right.  I mooted
this to Brucee, who ran with it and made mash by exploiting the module
loading of Inferno.  It was a brilliant coup and I wish I had it in other
systems.

-rob