GNU make vs. OBI

[andreas-prouza]

A long time I used GNU make for building my projects: ibm-i-build

However, I encountered some challenges over time:

• GNU make uses many shell operations --> shell operations are specially on IBM i very slow
• GNU make is compatible with Linux, IBM i, and Mac, but not Windows. Even there are some possibilities to install it on Windows:
  • Cygwin with GNU make Unfortunately not really compatible with the configuration (makefile) I used under Linux and IBM i.
  • Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
    • It's like crack a nut with a sledgehammer
    • Because WSL has it's own Network you may have problems with VPN, DNS, ...
• As the number of features to be supported increased, the complexity of the makefiles also grew.
• It also took a lot of time to figure out how to set up the makefile for a simple new feature.
• GNU make checks the timestamp of a source to see which one has changed and needs to be compiled.
  • It's really annoying when a developer clones a project from Git. All the sources have the current timestamp, so GNU make thinks they all need to be compiled.
  • There are a few workarounds you can try to get around this.
  • You also need to think about different time zones, ...
  • If you make changes and then undo them, you also need to reset the source date
  • ... --> You see: very annoying

So, I decided to create my own build tool: OBI (Object Builder fo i) It's a python based app which solves my problems with GNU make:

• Less shell operations --> much more better performance on IBM i
• OBI is can be used on all OS, since you just need to install Python
• New features are easier to implement --> E.g. it generates a well formatted report at the end:
• OBI uses the hash value of the source instead of the change date to find out if the source has changed.
• I decided to use the toml format for configurations. This has many advantages against JSON, XML, etc.:
  • Easy to ready
  • You can do comments
  • You can use trees and table structures