Jam - Make(1) Redux
Christopher Seiwald
INGRES Corporation
Seiwald@Ingres.Com
March 11, 1994
Abstract
Despite the progress of UNIX, the basic mechanism by which developers
build their programs - make(1) - has remained at its core unimproved
since its inception. Most notably, the make language has seen few
improvements. Jam is a make replacement that uses an extensible,
expressive language for describing ways in which files relate. This
new language simplifies the description of systems, both small and
large, and renders extending Jam's functionality not only possible but
easy.
Jam exists now and runs on many UNIX platforms, VMS, and NT. It is
freely available in the comp.sources.unix archives. As proof of
concept, it has been used to build a very large commercial product,
generating in a single invocation 1,000 deliverable files from 12,000
source files.
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