TerranMAKE

A small make for TSVM / TVDOS.

TerranMAKE is a deliberate subset of GNU Make. It reads a Makefile, works out which targets are out of date, and runs their recipes through the TVDOS shell. The command is still make and the file is still Makefile — "TerranMAKE" is just the name of this implementation.

make                 # build the first target in the Makefile
make clean           # build a specific target
make all CFLAGS=-O2  # build 'all', overriding a variable
make -n install      # dry run: show the recipes without running them

What it supports

• Explicit rules — target: prerequisites followed by TAB-indented recipe lines. Multiple targets per rule, multiple rules adding prerequisites to the same target, and inline target: dep ; recipe recipes.
• Variables — = (recursive), := (simple), ?= (set-if-unset), += (append). Expansion with $(NAME), ${NAME}, $X, and $$ for a literal $. Command-line VAR=value overrides win over the Makefile.
• Automatic variables in recipes — $@ (target), $< (first prerequisite), $^ (all prerequisites), $? (changed prerequisites), $+.
• Special targets — .PHONY (always considered out of date), plus .SILENT and .IGNORE.
• Order-only prerequisites — target: normal | order-only.
• Recipe prefixes — @ (don't echo), - (ignore errors), + (run even under -n).
• Comments (#), and line continuations (\ at end of line).
• Flags — -f FILE, -C DIR, -n, -s, -B, -i, -k, -h, -v.

What it does NOT support

By design (per the project brief): conditionals (ifeq/ifdef), loops, recursion, functions ($(wildcard …), $(patsubst …), …), and pattern / implicit rules (%.o: %.c) — i.e. no dynamic rule generation.

How "out of date" is decided (important)

GNU Make compares file modification times. TSVM's disk protocol never reports a file's mtime to a JS program (you can ask whether a file exists, its type, its size, and read its bytes — but there is no stat). A faithful mtime comparison is therefore impossible on this platform.

Instead, TerranMAKE records a content fingerprint (a hash of the bytes) of every prerequisite the last time a target was built, in a .tmake.state file next to the Makefile. A target is rebuilt when it is missing, phony, or when any prerequisite's contents changed since the last successful build.

The everyday effect is what you expect — edit a source, its dependents rebuild — but note the differences from real make:

• touch-ing a file without changing its contents does not force a rebuild.
• Deleting .tmake.state makes the next make rebuild everything.

Recipes and the TVDOS shell

Recipe lines are handed to the TVDOS shell (_G.shell.execute) exactly as written (after stripping any @ - + prefix), one line per shell invocation. Whatever the shell can run, a recipe can run: coreutils (cp, rm, mkdir, echo, …), pipes (|), and installed programs.

The TVDOS shell has no > file redirection (only pipes). To write a file from a recipe, pipe into writeto or tee, or use a program that writes its own output file:

# portable on TVDOS:
report.txt: data
	sort data | writeto report.txt

copy: original
	cp original copy

See examples/Makefile for a working example.

Installing

Via Hopper:

hop in make

Development / tests

The engine and parser are covered by a headless test suite that runs under the TSVM Node harness (no emulator needed). From a checkout of both this repo and tsvm:

node test/run.mjs           # engine + parser unit tests (uses a shell shim)
node test/integration.mjs   # end-to-end against the real TVDOS command.js shell

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later. See COPYING.