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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, 10:56:20 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

4 sources
erlehmann_·Aug 20, 2017
There exists DJB's redo approach [0], which i implemented [1], where dependencies and non-existence dependencies are only recorded after the build. A typical dofile is a shell script, so you do not need to learn another language. Targets also automatically depend on their own build rules (I have seen such a thing only in makefiles authored by DJB). I wrote a blog post to show how to integrate dependency output for both dependency and non-existence dependency generation [2]. The game “Liberation Circuit” can be built with my redo implementation; you can output a dependency graph usable with Graphviz [4] using “redo-dot”. There is only one other redo implementation that I would recommend, the one from Jonathan de Boyne Pollard [5], who rightly notices that compilers should output information about non-existence dependencies [6]. I would not
Read the rest
recommend the redo implementation from Avery Pennarun [7], which is often referenced (and introduced me to the concept), mainly because it is not implemented well: It manages to be both larger and slower than my shell script implementation, yet the documentation says this about the sqlite dependency (classic case of premature optimization): > I don't think we can reach the performance we want with dependency/build/lock information stored in plain text files [0] http://cr.yp.to/redo.html [1] http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/bin/redo-sh.html [2] http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/posts/redo-gcc-automati... [3] https://github.com/linleyh/liberation-circuit [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphviz [5] http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/redo/ [6] http://jdebp.eu./FGA/introduction-to-redo.html#CompilerDefic... [7] https://github.com/apenwarr/redo
In A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles
AceJohnny2·Aug 18, 2017
"Build systems are the bastard stepchild of every software project" -- me a years ago I've work in embedded software for over a decade, and all projects have used Make. I have a love-hate relationship with Make. It's powerful and effective at what it does, but its syntax is bad and it lacks good datastructures and some basic functions that are useful when your project reaches several hundred files and multiple outputs. In other words, it does not scale well. Worth noting that JGC's Gnu Make Standard Library (GMSL) [1] appears to be a solution for some of that, though I haven't applied it to our current project yet. Everyone ends up adding their own half-broken hacks to work around some of Make's limitations. Most commonly, extracting header file dependency from C files and integrating that into Make's dependency tree. I've looked at alter
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native build systems. For blank-slate candidates, tup [2] seemed like the most interesting for doing native dependency extraction and leveraging Lua for its datastructures and functions (though I initially rejected it due the the silliness of its front page.) djb's redo [3] (implemented by apenwarr [4]) looked like another interesting concept, until you realize that punting on Make's macro syntax to the shell means the tool is only doing half the job: having a good language to specify your targets and dependency is actually most of the problem. Oh, and while I'm around I'll reiterate my biggest gripe with Make: it has two mechanisms to keep "intermediate" files, .INTERMEDIATE and .PRECIOUS. The first does not take wildcard arguments, the second does but it also keeps any half-generated broken artifact if the build is interrupted, which is a great way to break your build. Please can someone better than me add wildcard support to .INTERMEDIATE. [1] http://gmsl.sourceforge.net [2] http://gittup.org/tup/ Also its creator, Mike Shal, now works at Mozilla on their build system [3] http://cr.yp.to/redo.html [4] https://github.com/apenwarr/redo
In Afraid of Makefiles? Don't be
beagle3·Mar 14, 2017
Closest in spirit to make, and does essentially all you want to do is "redo", concept drafter by djb, implemented independently by apenwarr[0] and by others. apenwarr's version has a super short "do" script (a couple of hundred lines of portable sh IIRC) which uses the same configuration but does a full rebuild each time. The two weak points are: (1) multiple outputs from a compilation step (yytab.c yytab.h from yacc) is not properly supported, and (2) no windows support. Other than that it's the perfect minimalistic make replacement -- what make should have been. Additionally, there tup[1]. With some assumptions about the build process that usually hold in non-distributed builds, it is the fastest, simplest make replacement; You just write a list of commands that builds your final outputs, and by tracing the processes it figures out exa
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ctly what needs to be done next time -- nothing more, and nothing less. [0] https://github.com/apenwarr/redo [1] http://gittup.org/tup/
In Buck – A build system developed and used by Facebook

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