Merits of bmake

Question

Apart from the fact that bmake is an BSD equivalent of GNU make, I could not clearly understand it's advantages over GNU make. Can anyone help me? I was able to find only one resource that was bit helpful. More help or pointers are appreciated.

Thanks, Prabhu

Answer 1

I'd never come across this, but it seems to be a version of NetBSD's make - from the resource you provided:

Thus bmake is kept in sync with NetBSD's make.

Frankly, if the author can't clearly spell out at least a couple of advantages of his program over `make (and it seems he can't), I wouldn't bother with it. GNU make has the advantages of being an industry standard and of being extremely well documented.

Answer 2

I'm not using it, but my understanding is that the BSD make is a make program + a standard library of templates (i.e. more or less the equivalent of GNU make + automake and perhaps autoconf).