writing (Gnu)MAKE in Python

[John Schmitt]

Hi.

I'd love to take the diversion of writing Make using Python.  The things
that are keeping me from doing this are, in order:

- I'm not completely convinced that doing this is a good thing
- my employer has not asked me to, and I doubt they would see the value in
it that I do
- Make is big and complicated and reproducing all the functionality that we
need (complete with quirks and bugs) would be time-consuming
- if I couldn't demonstrate its value immediately the work would not be
appreciated, especially since we have many other projects worthy of my time

The benefits as I see them (in no order):

- provide a Make that really, really works
- Make would work the same everywhere!  wouldn't that be great?!
- not only would Make work the same way everywhere, it would take care of
foreslash and backslash differences too!
- Make bugs would be easier to fix
- new features would be much easier to add
- if I got it into our tool set, just maybe, Python will be accepted as a
(preferred?:-) development tool
- if I did it, it would be my opportunity to learn Python and to learn Make
fairly well
- did I mention portability?

In a smaller way, I would like to have Bash, sed, and grep as Python
programs rather than compiled C.

Anyone volunteering? :-)

John