Mr. McGibby's Journal: Doopy Doo

So, my boss is out of town today, so I thought I would start writing in this silly /. journal.

I've been trying to work with gnu make to get it to do more than just compile code and link it in the right order. I've been trying to use it to update the genetics data that I work with. So I'm trying to do some things that I don't think that make was designed to do. Like creating implicit rules that can use more than a single pattern.

See, you can write an implicit rule like this to make a .out from a .in file:

%.out : %.in
                  do something...

But alas, if you want to do anything a little more complicated, like use a regular expression for the pattern match, then you're out of luck. Sorry.

I've been toying with some ideas for updating make while keeping backwards compatibility. Since I don't think that using more than one % is allowed in the target, then I'm thinking one could use two or more %s for delimiting a regular expression.

Like this:

bn%_Q(\w+)_DB(\w+)%.txt : $(rem1).nt $(rem2).db
              do some stuff...

So that $(rem1) would be the first match in the R.E. and $(rem2) would be the second.

Who knows.