2003-11-20 [VI] I just love [smake].  Mostly because I have tclsh across all the platforms I 
work on.  I thought there was something called "Jam", but couldn't find it.  In any case I
like the simple smake to the more complex (and more capable) [bras].  TMK [http://www.tmk-site.org] 
is also very capable and easy to use. 

Some notes about smake follow.  I have also emailed the author.

   * The documentation describes "uptarget".  The command is really "upTarget", note the uppercase T
   * In the code after the depend, the variable "target" is the current target being worked on.
   * If a target doesn't exist and if all the dependencies are up-to-date, then smake doesn't run the rule, which is counterintuitive, more on this below.
   * stdout and stderr redirection on the exec doesn't work.

----

Hm, didn't see your email. Maybe it got mixed up in all the spam :P Will look at these issues when I have a bit of time.  --[Setok]

----

When a target doesn't exist but all the dependencies are up-to-date, smake doesn't run the rule,
which is counter-intuitive.  e.g.

   target a {
     depend {b.o c.o} {
        link a [list b.o c.o] 
     }
   }

Here you would expect that if a doesn't exist, but b.o and c.o are up-to-date, then the link will
run.  That doesn't seem to happen for me (I could be just using it wrong).  In any case, to fix this
here's what I added:

Just before this:

    if {$update} {
        uplevel 1 $op
        uplevel 1 {set targetUpdate 1}
    }

in the proc "depend", I added this:

    if !$update {
        set thistarget [lindex $SmakeTargetPath end]
        if ![file exists $thistarget] {
            dputs 3 "Target $thistarget hasn't been made yet, update"
            set update 1
        }
    }

Hope this helps someone!

2003-11-20 [VI] : A possible cleaner way to do the set this target is to do it
like this:
    if !$update {
        upvar target thistarget
        if ![file exists $thistarget] {
            dputs 3 "Target $thistarget hasn't been made yet, update"
            set update 1
        }
    }
----
2003-11-20 [VI] : stdout and stderr redirection doesn't work.  I often write a 
command like
     exec grep -n Error $logfile > errors.log
smake nicely renames exec and prints the line before executing, but in this case
the redirection doesn't work.  To fix that, I change:
        eval "exec_old $args >@ stdout 2>@ stderr"
to just
        eval "exec_old $args"
I'm not sure why the >@ and 2>@ are there.  When would it be needed?
----
2003-12-03 [VI] : I do know now why 2>@ is required.  If you don't do that then the 
stuff printed to stderr causes the tcl [exec] to think that there's been an error.  So
like make if we want to be just return code based, then we need to add the 2>@.  A 
naive implementation :

 proc exec {args} {
    global TCL_ERROR

    if {![regexp {>&} $args] && ![regexp {[|][&]} $args] && ![regexp {2>} $args]} {
        append args " 2>@ stderr"
    }

    puts $args

    set rc [catch {
        eval "exec_old $args"
    } errmsg]

    if {$rc == $TCL_ERROR} {
        puts stderr "$::errorCode\n$::errorInfo"
        error $errmsg
    }
 }

I also found that sometimes I have stuff that I want to print the stuff I'm doing in Tcl to the stdout
because many things that were external commands in make become internal.  e.g.  file mkdir.  So I
added another trivial proc:

 proc tcl {args} {
    puts $args
    eval $args
 }

So I can mix exec and tcl calls in my commands and everything gets printed...

Should the eval above really be uplevel?   And perhaps there's a better way of writing those
three regexps in that expression..
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2003-12-19 [VI] I also like the way make lets you set variables on the command line, so:
        } elseif {[string equal $arg "--version"]} {
            # Show version
            puts $SmakeVersion
            exit
        } elseif {[regexp {^(.*)=(.*)$} $arg => name value]} {
            set ::$name $value
        } else {
            set parsed_args [lappend $parsed_args $arg]
        }
The two lines starting with the regexp are added to the parse_opt proc.