Re: [PATCHv2] Makefile: implement help target

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

quoted

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. :)

quoted

	  -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.

quoted

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