GNU Make

Raised as a usability problem by 25 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2012–2025), in 23 threads.

People raised many different problems with GNU Make, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 28 complaints

Error messages like 'Unexpected separator. Stop' give no indication of location in large files2025-02-05
Software that requires reading the manual to use signals poor UI/UX2025-02-05
Confusing clash between make and shell variable expansion, and shell differences across platforms2025-02-05
Make becomes hard to write and debug past a certain complexity2024-12-08
Hard to find the entry for a topic, like automatic variables2022-10-31
Default per-line shell behaviour is idiosyncratic and surprises users, and .ONESHELL behaves unexpectedly2022-08-21
Changing the recipe prefix breaks copy-pasting commands and editor indentation; .ONESHELL is a footgun2022-08-21
Counterintuitive build errors unless include lines are topologically ordered by hand2021-05-17
User-defined functions must be invoked through the clunky call function2021-03-09
Recursive make forces awkward manual hacks to sequence builds across dependencies2021-02-03
Make's syntax is unintuitive and confusing for newcomers, looks like a script but isn't2020-09-14
Target-specific export syntax looks local but also affects other targets, nondeterministically in parallel builds2019-05-26
Author struggles to remember GNU Make's variable precedence rules2019-02-01
Stale outputs from removed rules persist, causing confusing load-time bugs2018-11-22
Make needs crazy workarounds because it doesn't handle build steps with multiple outputs2018-07-12
Cryptic syntax causes hard-to-find bugs; docs hard to search and verbose2018-03-08
Writing a loop requires a convoluted eval contortion, unlike simpler BSD make syntax2018-03-06
GNU Make's language extensions are less coherent and less usable than BSD make's2018-02-28
Cryptic automatic variables like $< and $^ are hard to remember and understand2018-02-28
Spaces in file names break; hidden complexity and arcane language2018-02-28
Hard to make outputs rebuild from configuration; mixed styles get difficult as builds grow2018-02-28
Make's syntax is bad and lacks data structures, so it scales poorly2017-08-18
Crash recovery requires manually writing temp-file and atomic move steps in every recipe2017-07-24
Must define workaround variables like LEFTPAREN to escape parentheses2016-04-05
Non-trivial builds are cryptic, undebuggable, and hard to understand2015-04-11
Make's pattern rules and macros are hard to reason about and easy to get wrong2015-04-10
No easy way to pass a long list of files; only awkward workarounds2014-02-03
Some features break in nonintuitive ways for users2012-07-02