• Contact: tech-toolchain
• Duration estimate: 2 months

BSD make (aka bmake) uses traditional suffix rules (.c.o: ...) instead of pattern rules like gmake's (%.c:%.o: ...) which are more general and flexible.

The suffix module should be re-written to work from a general match-and-transform function on targets, which is sufficient to implement not only traditional suffix rules and gmake pattern rules, but also whatever other more general transformation rule syntax comes down the pike next. Then the suffix rule syntax and pattern rule syntax can both be fed into this code.

Note that it is already possible to write rules where the source is computed explicitly based on the target, simply by using $(.TARGET) in the right hand side of the rule. Investigate whether this logic should be rewritten using the match-and-transform code, or if the match-and-transform code should use the logic that makes these rules possible instead.

Implementing pattern rules is widely desired in order to be able to read more makefiles written for gmake, even though gmake's pattern rules aren't well designed or particularly principled.