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I firmly believe that there is only one production-quality makefile that has ever been written from scratch. Every other makefile has been copied from an earlier makefile, dating back to the one Ur-makefile, and modified to suit the author's purpose.
And a dependency-graph-of-thing-we-work-with to Makefile generator, like the output of gcc -M does.
In fact its a whole build system using gnu make, written from scratch.
print-%: ; @echo $*=$($*)
.PHONY: print-%
The mere fact that such a thing is necessary disqualifies make as a build tool for me. That being said, this trick could be handy for existing projects.
It's a very simple debugging addition. Hardly necessary, just convenient. The "built-in" echo works just fine as well.
That's one huge advantage with Rake, just add `p VARIABLE_NAME` anywhere in your Rakefile, and you'll see the textual value of it at that point.
I'd say that most people should not write makefiles by hand. You should use some higher level build system, that knows how to deal with source files in your language, track their dependencies, etc. A "hello world" makefile with one source file looks simple, but once the project gets more complicated, you quickly end up building such a high level build system yourself, with the additional disadvantage of restricting y…
Their reputation has been tarnished by autotools, but in that case you're using autotools as your build system, not make.
I firmly believe that there is only one production-quality makefile that has ever been written from scratch. Every other makefile has been copied from an earlier makefile, dating back to the one Ur-makefile, and modified to suit the author's purpose.
Then I read and thoroughly grokked the O'Reilly book on make (which some douche stole from my desk; twenty plus years on, I am still bitter about that one... ...don't miss the Tannenbaum OS book or the Stevens networking books, but the make book, it burns, it burns....)
After that all I wrote all of my make files from scratch. Doing so made sure I understood my project, its dependencies, etc., and made sure I wasn't going to accidentally corrupt a build with some edge case from another one.
make is super straightforward once you get how it works. Sort of like git rebase, I suppose (still working on that one... :->).
Back to the subject, I would also be interested to know a way to print out the value of a variable every time it changed in the course of a make system's execution.
I'd say that most people should not write makefiles by hand. You should use some higher level build system, that knows how to deal with source files in your language, track their dependencies, etc. A "hello world" makefile with one source file looks simple, but once the project gets more complicated, you quickly end up building such a high level build system yourself, with the additional disadvantage of restricting y…
Makefiles, once you have learned the syntax, are very simple to write, as they can be naturally decomposed into individual steps, and rules are easily generalized for similar file types. Their reputation has been tarnished by autotools, but in that case you're using autotools as your build system, not make.
That's one huge advantage with Rake, just add `p VARIABLE_NAME` anywhere in your Rakefile, and you'll see the textual value of it at that point.
You can add echo commands to Makefiles just as easily. Rake is cool for Ruby programs, but that's about it.
I usually use Makefiles for my Ruby projects.