General FAQ

1. Why choosing the name 'PMK' ?

The first name of this project was premake. But when trying to get an account on sourceforge this name was already taken. So the name was changed to pmk.

2. Then why using premk on sourceforge ?

Well pmk was already used for a "ghost" project since 2000-10-04, so premk was chosen as it was avalaible. For some time, pmk was hosted as premk on sourceforge. Eventually, we were able to switch to pmk on sourceforge as well.

3. What is the problem with autoconf ?

Well if you have no problem with autoconf then PMK is not for you :).
That said some people (like us) don't like autoconf for many reasons. For those people we try to provide PMK as an alternative.

4. Why the BSD license ?

The founder of the project chosen this licence because it was the one that best fit his mind. Don't even think to bother us about using another licence, you'll be disappointed.

5. Does PMK support the same platforms as autoconf ?

No, since the beginning pmk was designed for POSIX (Unix like) systems. Check the STATUS file for currently supported platforms. We try to support most available Unix and Unix-like operating systems.

6. Do you plan to make it running under windows ?

We don't have any plan actually, PMK was POSIX oriented since the beginning. We also want to keep this project as simple as possible so a specific port of PMK is the best solution for each kind of platform. Now if someone want to port PMK to windows: just contact us !

7. Why not supporting Cygwin ?

Because we found that Cygwin was not handling executable files as it should. We think it's absurd to have to take care about a trailing '.exe' under a Unix-like environment.
Support could eventually come back when Cygwin will behave as a real POSIX system.

8. Is it possible to include PMK scripts in the source package ?

First PMK is a set of BINARIES. Avoiding scripts that can hide malicious code is one of our goals.
Unlike Autoconf scripts that can be added to the package PMK can be seen as a dependency. Compiling PMK for each project will be redundant.

9. Then isn't Autoconf superior as it can be included in the package without requiring a dependency ?

In real life most of the systems are already needing Autoconf installation. So PMK has made the choice to be an independant package.

10. Do you think that PMK will replace Autoconf ?

We don't know and we don't want to as it's not our goal. Autoconf has also some goals that we don't share. It's just another tool with a different point of view.

11. Why so few questions in this faq ?

Because nobody asked for more :)