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apenwarr
redo
Python2010–2023
apenwarr / redo

redo

Smaller, easier, more powerful, and more reliable than make. An implementation of djb's redo.

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33Distinct people
42Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.9KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Smaller, easier, more powerful, and more reliable than make. An implementation of djb's redo.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:02:05 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year42 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2010-12-14 12:59:14 UTC to 2023-04-25 13:22:40 UTC.

02462010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 2 submissions, 1 comments20102011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20102010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC321
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
redo - a recursive build system Smaller, easier, more powerful, and more reliable than make. This is an implementation of Daniel J. Bernstein's redo build system. He never released his version, so other people have implemented different variants based on his published specification. This version, sometimes called apenwarr/redo, is probably the most advanced one, including parallel builds, improved logging, extensive automated tests, and helpful debugging features. To build and test redo, run: ./do -j10 test To install it, run something like this: DESTDIR= PREFIX=/usr/local ./do -j10 install View the documentation via readthedocs.org Visit the source code on github Discussions and support via the mailing list (archives). You can subscribe by sending any email message to redo-list+subscribe@googlegroups.com (note the plus sign). You can send questions or feedback (with or without subscribing) by sending messages to redo-list@googlegroups.com.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

2 sources
sigil·Oct 2, 2016
I can recommend apenwarr's redo implementation [0]. There's occasional activity on the mailing list [1], which leads me to believe people are using it, but not promoting it much. The apenwarr implementation includes a full Python implementation as well as a minimal version in < 200 lines of sh. The minimal version doesn't support incremental rebuilds -- the out-of-date-ness tracking in the full Python version uses sqlite -- but it's good for understanding the redo concept. Also good for embedded contexts. I used the full redo implementation for some data processing tasks once, with mixed results. It was a situation where I couldn't declare the dependency graph up front. With redo, each target declares its dependencies locally when it builds, and redo assembles and tracks the dynamic dependency graph. It's pretty neat, but become difficult
Read the rest
to reason about and debug. Could be that I never got comfortable with the new paradigm, or could be that essential tooling was missing, not sure. I still think redo is promising. Anyway after a decade of messing with shiny new build tools, I finally learned to stop worrying and love the bomb (make). It's weird and warty but surprisingly capable. Worth the learning investment. Oh and jgrahamc's "GNU Make Book" is great. [2] [0] https://github.com/apenwarr/redo [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/redo-list [2] https://www.nostarch.com/gnumake
In Tup – A file-based build system for Linux, OS X, and Windows
AceJohnny2·May 22, 2016
One misfeature I discovered recently and I wished got fixed is .SECONDARY vs .PRECIOUS [1]. Both are used to tell Make to keep intermediate products of chains of rules. However, .SECONDARY does not accept wildcards (%.o patterns for example), only .PRECIOUS does. However, .PRECIOUS also adds the guard that an incomplete intermediate product is kept in case Make is interrupted, which you would only ever want for a trivial stamp file. In any other case, you risk ending up with a runt file that breaks your next build. So if, like any significant project I know, your build specifies lots of wildcard ("implicit") rules, you're stuck using .PRECIOUS, in which case you can never interrupt the build for risk of leaving it in a broken state. FWIW, djb's "redo" concept [2] is based centrally around atomicity to avoid such a problem. [1] https://www
Read the rest
.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Special-T... [2] https://github.com/apenwarr/redo
In GNU Make 4.2

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