Using MAKE for building Perl programmes?

jdtoronto has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Esteemed Monks,

My Win32 Perl/Tk application refuses to lie down and is getting bigger and bigger. It now has a total of four separate .exe's which I produce using ActiveState PerlApp - I have written a little Perl script which handles part of this.

But before I jump off the deep end I had a late night flash - why not use MAKE? Given that I am on Win32, possibly Microsofts NMAKE. I already use it for building 'C' applications for microcontrollers - but is it considered 'still state-of-the art' for what I am proposing?

I need to:

Make sure all the files exist
Run four passes through PerlApp (each with different command line options)
Run a final PerlApp that packs the four exe's and some dll's into a single exe.
Run a NSIS Installer compile session
Upload files to a server using ftp.

Or should I just write a Perl script that will do everything ? Any other suggestions?

jdtoronto

Comment on Using MAKE for building Perl programmes?

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Re: Using MAKE for building Perl programmes? by kvale (Monsignor) on Apr 13, 2006 at 16:38 UTC
I usually use make (or nmake) for projects in which there is a hierarchy of dependencies with cacheable intermediate products, like object files. Do your four passes correspond to four separate compilations of four source files? If so, nmake can speed up the build process by only compiling the files that have changed. Otherwise, I can't see any advantage to using make over perl. -Mark	[reply]
Re^2: Using MAKE for building Perl programmes? by jdtoronto (Prior) on Apr 13, 2006 at 16:49 UTC
Good point, the four builds (done by PerlApp) are independant. But three of them may not change - so we may not need to build them. jdtoronto	[reply]