Goals: Red Hat Developer Working On New Tool To Improve Upon Make

Longtime Red Hat developer Richard Jones has begun developing "Goals" as a new tool to improve upon Make, the common build automation tool.

While more open-source projects are turning to CMake or Meson+Ninja, Red Hat's Richard Jones has been working on Goals as an incremental improvement over Make and aiming to address some of the design deficits for this originally four decade old software.

Richard says of Make, "Make is a great tool! It's easy to get started, intuitive, and wildly successful. If I criticize make it's not because I think it's a bad tool, just that we could do even better if we addressed some shortcomings." With Goals, he is trying to address these shortcomings.

Goals is experimental at this stage and he recently gave a talk to fellow Red Hat employees on the effort. Red Hat does maintain a copyright on the Goals files, so he is at least working on it partially in a Red Hat capacity.

There is an MP4 video recording of his talk of Goals. There are also his notes where he explains more of the Make shortcomings and work on Goals.

The Goals source code is currently hosted here.