4. History of Mosmake

Here is a change log for Mosmake, also serving as documentation of its history.

Fall 1999

Mosmake's grandfather: A Perl script called supermosdep that I used to massage mosmldep output for the prototype implementation of my M.Sc. thesis Region-based memory management for Prolog. Used a horrible system of flag files to ensure that enough `.uo' files would be be produced before trying to link the final program.

Spring 2001

Earliest Mosmake-like system: I ported supermosdep to build a research protype for the region system I was developing with Henning Niss and Fritz Henglein. This prototype used toplevel-mode compilation, so mosmldep was replaced by a `Dependencies' file.

Fall 2001

First Smartmake feature. The then-current version of GNU make had bugs in its `-t' implementation, so Smartmake only worked with a specially patched GNU make. The patch was later accepted as a bug fix for GNU make 3.80.

Fall 2002

After steady growth in the complexity of our prototype as well as its build system, we felt the need to split it into several directories. So the cross-directory support of the build system was born. Eventually I decided that what I'd done was hairy enough that other people might benefit from reusing it rather than inventing something similar themselves. Thus --

0.9 (released Nov 19 2002)

After a couple of weeks of separating the build system from the system it builds, generalizing it slightly, and .. shiver .. documenting it (ack! the manual is currently thrice as big as the code that actually does something), I proudly present Mosmake 0.9 to the world!