Introduction/FAQ

Why another build tool?

There’s no real reason; I just wanted to experiment. After using build systems like Shake (very powerful but complex) and Cake (simple and elegant but very rebuild-the-wheel type), I wanted a mix. I like Haskell, but I don’t like it enough to work with it that much. (FUTURE EDIT: I now like Haskell a lot more, but it’s large size is a big problem when trying to deploy.) TinyMk is written in Python, which is pre-installed on most Unix-like platforms, and is very portable. One thing I especially liked about Cake was the use of creative prefixes (task build calls build:objects and build:library). TinyMk implements this using categories.

Is TinyMk better than x?

No. Every build system has different goals/concepts. It’s useless to ask if x is better than y when they have completely different end goals.

Of course, when comparing x to CMake/autotools, x always wins.

Why is the documentation so out-of-date?

Work-in-progress. I hate writing API docs.

I have a question about using TinyMk. Where should I go?

Use the mailing list: tinymk@googlegroups.com.