

Replace make with Rake - trotter_cashion
http://www.trottercashion.com/2010/10/29/replacing-make-with-rake.html

======
metajack
For Erlang specifically, you should probably use rebar
(<http://github.com/basho/rebar>). It is pretty much the best thing ever.

A common pattern lately is to use rebar with a very minimal makefile that just
makes things like "make" and "make test" do the equivalent rebar actions so
that people unfamiliar with it don't even notice.

~~~
trotter_cashion
Rebar definitely looks pretty cool. Is there any documentation for it other
than this video (<http://vimeo.com/8311407>) though?

~~~
metajack
There is no real documentation yet, which is unfortunate. "rebar -c" is pretty
helpful for what commands it has, and most of the layout conventions are not
rebar's, but OTP's (those are documented here:
[http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/applications.htm...](http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/applications.html#id69069)).
A rebar.config.sample file is provided in the GitHub repo which lists every
configuration option. The mailing list and its archives are also pretty useful
if you get stuck.

------
tommi
For Erlang and many other languages, plain Rake is good. For Java and some JVM
based languages buildr ( <http://buildr.apache.org/> ) provides a nice
abstraction on top of Rake and also support for Maven repositories.

------
gurraman
As we've started to name other alternatives to make: waf[1]

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/waf/>

------
seiji
This is a good article about fixing dumb makefiles in Joe's book, but please
don't use Rake with any actual Erlang projects. Rebar does everything you want
and probably more.

