I promise it is work related!

Today I Learned

1. I need a Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet adapter
2. Makefile syntax can be hard
3. Repeat: Communication is essential

For the Ethernet problem, it was a matter of needing one at work and not having one. I figure that is the sort of thing I just have on-hand.

make spits out a lot of errors. And it’s really frustrating, because sometimes those errors don’t make any sense. But it’s fine. Everything is fine. Effectively, I was helping a co-intern work on a Makefile, and we wanted to do something like this:

deploy:
	@if ! some_cmd --params ; then
		some_cmd
	fi

Only, that doesn’t work. I have yet to go back and read the make documentation (it’s on my to do list, don’t worry), but trial and error with a simplified version showed that this works:

deploy:
	@if true ; then \
		echo "Hello world" ; \
	fi

Now, in normal shell syntax, you don’t need the semicolon on the echo line, and you don’t need those line continuations. So you can imagine why I’m perturbed–the above is ugly.

Oh, and by the way, I finally got into the company Slack. Still no email access, but at least I can communicate and Get Stuff Done™.

Categories: Blog