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Lots of "Don't do this" without suggesting alternatives doesn't do anyone much good. If you're on a *nix system, building C/C++ programs (or automating one-off builds like the example), what would you recommend in make's place?
I'd suggest tup[1] and Shake[2]. [1]: http://gittup.org/tup/ [2]: http://community.haskell.org/~ndm/shake/
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I'll have to respectfully disagree. IMHO, the utility of DSLs like Make is high when used very sparingly, for simple flows like the one the linked article describes. The more complex your Makefile, the less you should be using Make. If you need to write complete programs in Make, just stop bending over backwards and pick a real programming language. FWIW most non-trivial projects nowadays that use Make don't write ma…
Make is the assembly/C language of build system. Lots of other systems just generate makefile compatible files (qmake, cmake, premake, others), but often these fall into overly complex traps trying to explain everything both with simple unique words, and then clashing into these. Make is very optimal at the stage it is, everything above or below it it's just not that optimal.
Using make gets quickly really ugly. I wrote many Makefiles in my life and if you have to try to stick to GNU Make. At least it provides some basic functionality. But even that gets nasty quite soon when you need a simple thing like conditions with "and" or "or". If you have to write portable Makefiles ... well fsck. http://www.conifersystems.com/whitepapers/gnu-make/ There were recent discussions about adding GNU Gu…
Personally, I don't want a programming language in my makefiles. Unless working in a very codified environment (Java and Maven, for example), I think it is vital to keep your build system as simple as you can. If I absolutely need nontrivial logic in my makefile, I would much, much rather be forced to call out to a script file (because it encourages not doing that ). And if you insist on parking a programming languag…
I am writing this on Ubuntu LTS (12.04) and none of those three advanced build systems above is available from the default repos. This means a serious dependency burden, if somebody wants to build my stuff.
A few years ago, Jam was a promising build system. It seems to be dead now. Hopefully, tup and shake will stay longer.
Until you have good reasons against make, it is a perfectly fine initial solution.
Absolutely do not use make for any new project. If you love make, it's a big, red, burning flag that you're not demanding enough of your tools and that you're not keeping up with changes in your ecosystem. There are many, many way better alternatives to make. Which one is better depends on the platform you're on. The majority of them throws in automatic dependency management for free. Yes, I know that the essence of…
If you are on a unix system, "redo" (designed by djb and implemented by apenwarr) is excellent. It's refreshingly simple and robust. And, there's a minimalist version called "do" which is a hundred-or-so lines of shell, that does a complete rebuild (no dependency tracking) - so you can package that with your project, and not have to worry about your users having to install yet another build system. Other alternatives…
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Personally, I don't want a programming language in my makefiles. Unless working in a very codified environment (Java and Maven, for example), I think it is vital to keep your build system as simple as you can. If I absolutely need nontrivial logic in my makefile, I would much, much rather be forced to call out to a script file (because it encourages not doing that ). And if you insist on parking a programming languag…
After using Rake (ruby with some dependency DSLish stuff) on a project for a solid year, I appreciate Make much more. Rake is too powerful and makes it too easy to keep a bunch of complex logic inside the Rakefile. Our project, left unchecked, turned the Rakefile into a pile of spaghetti. Make, on the other hand, being kind of crufty and inconvenient, encourages moving complex logic out of itself and into external sc…
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CMake generates Makefiles and it really is only good for building software while Make can be used for any number of complex tasks. I agree that if you need a build system use CMake it will make your life easy.
> use CMake it will make your life easy At the expense of your users. Okay, I know next to nothing about CMake. All I know is that it is extremely frustrating when I get the source to a project that uses CMake and then have to modify the CFLAGS or figure out why it can't find some include file. Of course, the same applies to makefiles generated by automake. Let's just write our makefiles by hand, people.
But I can see why this is annoying to users.
I think what you were looking for here is actually a shell script, rather than a Makefile. A shell script is much more suitable for general purpose programming. Or better yet, use Python ;-) And, let's admit it, for small projects dependency analysis is overrated (although it can be implemented easily enough in a real programming language).