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Andy J
Andy J

Reputation: 1545

What was the first release date of GNU Make?

I know from the Wikipedia page for the Make utility, that Make first appeared in 1976 and its author was Stuart Feldman. It is also mentioned on that Wiki page that Make went through many rewrites, probably most famously GNU Make.

The GNU Make Manual opens by saying that its original authors were Richard Stallman and Roland McGrath (and later Paul D. Smith), but fails to give a date.

I've scrounged around the internet trying to find the release date of the first Stallman/McGrath version of GNU Make, but I have come up fruitless. Does anyone in this community happen to know?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 709

Answers (1)

Jonathan Wakely
Jonathan Wakely

Reputation: 171413

The first commit in the source repository is:

commit d5998dcec13c4d3f5efe9584008b8dbfabc28f09
Author: Roland McGrath <[email protected]>
Date:   Sat Apr 23 16:12:14 1988 +0000

    Initial revision
    This version was distributed by RMS in `binutils.tar'.

So this suggests it was previously available as part of a tarball release (but not tracked in source control) some time before Apr 23 1988.

The first copyright date in the GNU Make manual is also 1988.

The GNU's Bulletin, vol. 1 no. 4, February, 1988 says:

The GNU version of Make is now ready, and will be distributed soon.

And the GNU's Bulletin, vol. 1 no. 5, June, 1988 says:

We have been distributing the GNU `make' utility for several months.

So that means the initial release was distributed some time after February 1988.

Upvotes: 4

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