Re: [PATCHv2] Makefile: implement help target

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sep 29, 2010, 07:34 UTC
Message-ID: <20100929073400.GA28010@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <4CA2E4C7.305@drmicha.warpmail.net>

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 09:03:35AM +0200, Michael J Gruber wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> > Surely this is why we have perl?
> 
> I don't speak perl.
> 
> Honestly, this is slowly going on my nerves. Maybe it's because I'm
> reading too many "can't we do it this way" responses in one go and
> without being coffeinated, and without seeing how "different" is better.
> [I've been heeding all advise on portability and readability, as you can
> see.]

I should have been more clear about my motivations. It was mainly "I wonder how short I can make this in perl?" The alternate sorting was something that happened incidentally, though it did make more sense to me.

So you can just ignore me if you like. :)

Show 7 quoted lines

> > 	  -e 'for (sort keys(%h)) {' \
> > 	  -e '  print "$$_:\n";' \
> > 	  -e '  printf("    %-20s%s\n", @$$_) for (@{$$h{$$_}});' \
> > 	  -e '}' Makefile
> > 
> 
> How portable are the regexps and the array/dictionary push?

AFAIK, it should work with any perl5. I don't have any ancient versions handy to test these days, though.

Show 8 quoted lines

> > Note that mine will actually print the targets in a heading in the order
> > in which they appear in the Makefile, which I consider slightly more
> > useful (especially in that we can tweak the order easily).
> 
> I don't think Makefile order would be useful. If you know exactly what
> you're looking for you need no sorting, you can just search for that
> term. (I would do a 'grep -A20 "^target:" Makefile' or hit "/^target" in
> my vim but I'm sure there's a different way of doing it in perl...)

What I was trying to say was more that alphabetical is not necessarily the most useful order to present things in the help screen. Probably there is some hand-selected order that presents the entries in the least confusing way. And one way of representing that is to have the topics in that order in the Makefile, which in theory probably makes reading the Makefile itself simpler.

But yeah, this is way over-thinking the issue. It's a fricking list of Makefile targets. I am happy with your original patch.

-Peff