A Simple Makefile for Medium-Sized C/C++ Projects

Post by _RPM » Fri, Aug 26, 2016, 2:17 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #36

pja wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no point telling people not to do something if you don’t give them an alternative that does do all those things. (And no, “just use autotools” is not a viable answer.)

Autotools does do all of those things. I'm not a particular fan of it either, but when I'm packaging software for a Linux distro then I'd rather see autotools or cmake being used instead of some crappy custom build system that will require patching to make it work. There is room for someone to come up with a good build system. It had better do everything autotools and cmake do, and be well documented and widely used,…

    ./configure
      make
      make install

Post by qznc » Fri, Aug 26, 2016, 2:18 PM UTC

andrewaylett wrote: post #31

kmm wrote: post #2

Neat! I've been putting off learning how to use those `-M` flags to automatically generate dependencies, but it looks like it's not that hard :) What I also like to do is hide the actual compilation command with recipes like this, inspired by the Linux kernel %.o : %.c @echo " CC $ I think it looks a lot tidier, it turns a ton of dense uninteresting command lines into a few dozen short lines.

In a past life, the mega-but-autogenerated Makefile I helped maintain would store the executed command and only echo it if the command failed. And we logged everything to file, so you got nice output but all the info was there if we needed it. Didn't take that long to work out how to do it, once we'd decided it would be a nice thing to have.

Post by wyldfire » Fri, Aug 26, 2016, 2:19 PM UTC

TickleSteve wrote: post #39

"But because Make works backward from the object files to the source, we need to compute all the object files we want from our source files". No.... don't do this. Make is intended to work the other way around... it finds the source from your targets. Define your VPATH and let it find them. This is what loads of people do and is why there are so many Makefiles are packed full of macro-magic!

Post by shoover » Fri, Aug 26, 2016, 2:19 PM UTC

pja wrote: post #29

rwmj wrote: post #10

Please don't brew your own build system. It likely won't handle at least one of the following situations: * installing into a DESTDIR * setting custom CFLAGS/LDFLAGS * changing prefix, libdir, sysconfdir * cross-compilation * parallel builds * conditional features * missing requirements and will make packaging your software in Linux distros much harder than it needs to be.

There’s no point telling people not to do something if you don’t give them an alternative that does do all those things. (And no, “just use autotools” is not a viable answer.)

Post by Tyr42 » Fri, Aug 26, 2016, 2:20 PM UTC

revelation wrote: post #17

onli wrote: post #5

I do like simple makefiles. I adopted a C++-project without having much C++-knowledge, and simplifying the build setup was a big step in making it mine. Thinking that it might be nice, I tried this one instead of my own approach at a simple makefile ( https://github.com/onli/simdock/blob/master/Makefile ) and I get this error: > Makefile:16: * missing separator. Stop. Which raises kind of an important point: Simple m…

Your editor probably automatically converted tabs into spaces. And just like that, the Makefile stops working. Which proves the point: Makefiles are at a point in life where they should be exclusively automatically generated. The only exception are throwaway projects where you and only you use it.