plug] make vs. imake?

[R P Herrold]

On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Robert N. Eaton wrote:

> Then I tried locate make, and among other things turned up many references to 
> imake.  I invoked man imake, but this left some question as to whether imake 
> is a direct replacement for make.

> After invoking tar xvvzf to xxx.tar.gz, invoke imake -l (or -D?), xmkmf (to 
> create a make file from the imake file, then make install, and make clean.
>
> Is this the process? Or am I still in the dark?

imake is not a replacement for gnu make - it is a deprecated 
variant, dating from the days of the Athena Project, and 
largely found and useful for building Motif based 
applications, and older XFree86 build uses.  The auto-tools - 
autoconf, automake, libtool, make - have supplanted imake in 
mindshare long since, and imake's day is done

With the advent of x.org, and the passing of Motif for more 
'sexy' widget toolkits, about the only piece of software which 
I use that still builds with imake, is 'ghostview'

It is almost inconceivable that gnu make not available for any 
FOSS platform and distribution, as 'make' is one of the basic 
tools

-- Russ Herrold