Get the latest tech news
How I stopped worrying and loved Makefiles
First contact with make When I was invited for my first job interview in the IT, I’ve been asked such question: How would you typically build a program from sources, what commands will you use? I answered: It’s obvious: ./configure make make install Those times belong to the past now and nowadays not many programmers use GNU Make1. Try asking this question and you will see disgust at best. For many it’s the fist contact with make and often the last one, but not for me 😉
With Postfix servers, you’ve been usually writing a bunch of text files like aliases, transports, etc, which have to be indexed to the binary Berkley DB format. If you missed to update one of map files, your configuration wasn’t effective and you could spend hours debugging: why this f… alias do not work? Many of my colleagues considered this tool an “old school” or “obsolete” initially, but they eventually fall under impression of the recipes simplicity and now just replicate them all around.
Or read this on Hacker News