`make' written in elisp

[Michael Schierl <schierlm-usenet@gmx.de>]

Hi,

I'm not sure if I am right here ("Emacs development discussions."
Discussions about developing Emacs, developing for Emacs or developing with
Emacs...?) so if i'm wrong I'd like if you pointed me into the right
direction...

For most users of Emacs who are not on *ix, it is harder to install new
packages than for those on *ix since most (GNU) Emacs "extensions" are
shipped with makefiles or autoconf scripts. This works flawlessly on Unix
but not on other systems - especially because most of the simpler scripts
make assumptions where your emacs binary or your site-lisp directory is.
You can adjust this for every single package, but what for? most makefiles
don't do more than runninge batch-byte-compile for the .el files, makeinfo
for the .texi files and install-info for the resulting info files (plus
copying the files where they belong).

So I tried to write a framework completely in Elisp (except makeinfo at the
moment, because `texinfo-format-buffer' seems to be just
crashy/buggy/whatever when applying it to "in-the-wild" texinfo files)
called elMake¹.

Its syntax is similar to that of apache ant, except it is in sexps instead
of xml tags (Users writing Elisp should be familiar with that syntax).

It seems to work quite well so far (example "elMakefiles" for jde, auctex
and of course elmake itself seem to work as desired).

You can have a look at it at http://elmake.sourceforge.net/ (the website is
quite "minimalistic", but what do you need more for a 42KB download?).


So, and why do i write here? I'd like to know

- what you think of that idea
- if you could think to use it for your own emacs addons (if you maintain 
  any)
- what is bad at the particular implementation
- if you find any bugs
- what features are missing
- how to install such a thing in your opinion (atm it is a .el file to be 
  loaded and pressed C-x C-e at the correct position)
- and everything else you can think of (if related to elMake).

For answers you might use the elmake-devl mailing list at sourceforge, but
of course I'll read answers on this list as well.

TIA,

Michael

¹ hit 2 on Google for "elmake" is the (empty) sf.net project site atm...