11–20 of 127 posts
CFLAGS := ${CFLAGS} CFLAGS += -ansi -std=99 What's the point of the first line? Why not just: CFLAGS += -ansi -std=99
Because CFLAGS may not be set in the environment, resulting in concatenation to an undefined variable error.
$ cat Makefile
FOO += foo
all: ; @echo $(FOO)
$ make
fooCFLAGS := ${CFLAGS} CFLAGS += -ansi -std=99 What's the point of the first line? Why not just: CFLAGS += -ansi -std=99
$ cat Makefile
CFLAGS = -Wall
$(info $(flavor CFLAGS))
CFLAGS := $(CFLAGS)
$(info $(flavor CFLAGS))
$ make
recursive
simple
There are so many gotcha with makefiles yet we still use them regularly. I'm considering moving on to something like Taskfile [1], though I haven't tried it yet. [1]: https://taskfile.org/
I recently decided it was time to get a better understanding of how makefiles work, and after reading a few tutorials, ended up just reading the manual. It's long, but it's very, very well written (a good example of one of the Gnu projects biggest strengths), to the point where just starting at the top and reading gives an almost tutorial-like effect. Just read the manual!
The Make language is the assembly language of build systems. Do you really enjoy writing assembly all the time?
Makefiles, Best Practices: Don't write Makefiles, use a higher level language to describe your goal and some tool to execute it (either directly or through generating a Ninja file). The Make language is the assembly language of build systems. Do you really enjoy writing assembly all the time?
Sure, you should be careful of scaling it far. BUT, please enlighten me on a sane high-level build system?
cmake, bazel and the like all seems to rely on unintuitive macros. And let's not talk about auto tools :)
What other mainstream build system will get you started quickly without unintuitive macros. (I won't claim that makefiles are often intuitive, hehe)
A particularly tricky task with GNU make is automatically adding target dependencies on header files and handling updates to them (gcc's -M and -MMD switches). It would be great if the article explained those best practices, too.
Makefiles, Best Practices: Don't write Makefiles, use a higher level language to describe your goal and some tool to execute it (either directly or through generating a Ninja file). The Make language is the assembly language of build systems. Do you really enjoy writing assembly all the time?
Make is simple.. it gets me started. I can do multiple targets with dependencies and incremental compilation.. Sure, you should be careful of scaling it far. BUT, please enlighten me on a sane high-level build system? cmake, bazel and the like all seems to rely on unintuitive macros. And let's not talk about auto tools :) What other mainstream build system will get you started quickly without unintuitive macros. (I w…
Sure, everything in CMake is not super intuitive, but I've led workshops were people got the hang of it pretty quickly for simple to advanced cases (including multiple targets and some scripting). Keep it simple, most of the time, you don't need the advanced features at all!
Can't say the same for Make, apparently, people need to write about it still today! And most of the Makefiles are just plain wrong and won't make any reproducible and reliable builds. That's a big no in my book for a build system!
Makefiles, Best Practices: Don't write Makefiles, use a higher level language to describe your goal and some tool to execute it (either directly or through generating a Ninja file). The Make language is the assembly language of build systems. Do you really enjoy writing assembly all the time?