LAlaamalif·Jan 18, 2017Submission
Bsdowl – A portable build system for modern Unix systems
2 points · Open discussionforetspaisibles
bsdowl
Makefile2015–2017
foretspaisibles / bsdowl
bsdowl
A highly portable build system targeting modern UNIX systems. Supports C, OCaml, TeX, METAPOST, NOWEB, M4, and more. Based on BSD Make.
3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
106GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A highly portable build system targeting modern UNIX systems. Supports C, OCaml, TeX, METAPOST, NOWEB, M4, and more. Based on BSD Make.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
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 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM 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 month3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-08-30 19:30:07 UTC to 2017-01-18 12:59:57 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 2015 | 2015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Sep 2015 | 2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2015 | 2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2015 | 2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2015 | 2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2016 | 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2016 | 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2016 | 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2016 | 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2016 | 2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2016 | 2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2016 | 2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2016 | 2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2016 | 2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2016 | 2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2016 | 2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesThanks! Also note
1) It currently supports M4 and provided that there is a simple rule to infer the name of the preprocessed file from the name of the unprocessed file, it would be easy to add another one, see [1].
It is also possible to support more complicated source generation tools, like literate programming tool. We currently have support for noweb [2] which could be used to derive more.
[1] https://github.com/michipili/bsdowl/blob/master/bps/bps.m4.mk
[2] https://github.com/michipili/bsdowl/blob/master/bps/bps.noweb.mk
2) I would say, they are not difficult to write, but these are Makefile, and programming Makefiles is a mindset on its own, because we never write the “glorious high-level procedure doing plop-plop fuzz-fuzz on all our files” but just move from one step to the other and must save all state in inodes. :) The fol
Read the rest
der `bps` contains code which is shared by all frameworks (langc, texmf, ocaml, script).
3, 4) The system supports two variables ARCHITECTURE and CONFIGURATION which are used to selectively include a configuration file to tweak flags (like debugging, profiling, cross-compiler chain and the like) and which can be used to tweak the directory where compilation products are stored. Once it is setup it just looks like
bmake ARCHITECTURE=Mingw32
bmake ARCHITECTURE=Native CONFIGURATION=Release
You can see a small example in the example/langc/heat directory [3]
[3] https://github.com/michipili/bsdowl/tree/master/example/langc/heat
BSD Owl: A build system targeting modern Unix systems
26 points · Open discussion