Want to contribute ideas to a make replacement?

[Dan Bernstein]

I've finished version 1.00 of mick, a public-domain replacement for
make. However, I don't want mick to suffer the same fate as make, where
useful, high-level features are anything but portable.

So: Are you dissatisfied with make? Are you interested in contributing
to mick before it's released? Just send me a note at brnstnd at nyu.edu,
and you'll get the latest version in exchange for your comments and
ideas. (Please mention whether you have ftp.) I don't guarantee that
I'll accept every idea or that mick will ever become popular, but at the
very least you'll be free to use mick in your own projects. I aim for
this summer to send mick 2.00 to comp.sources.unix.

Please don't flood me with e-mail unless you have some specific ideas
about what you'd like to see in project management software. I don't
want early versions running around wild if the mick standard changes or
if mick gains lots of additional features; no one is so desperate for a
better make that he *needs* the latest versions of *everything*.

mick should compile and run on any UNIX system without much trouble.
There's a script to test for system features and change configuration
files, and you can just ``mick tests'' to run a few random tests. Note
that mick is not backwards-compatible with make, as it has a quite
different philosophy.

---Dan
``mick. It's Australian for make, mate.''