GNU Make Project Management: Third Edition

Author: Robert Mecklenburg (USA)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-06-01
Features: As is well-known, the make tool is a long-standing feature on Unix and other operating systems. Make was invented in the 1970s and is still used today as the core compilation assistance tool in most programming projects. It can even build the Linux kernel. In the third edition of this book, you will learn why this tool remains at the forefront of project build software despite the emergence of many new competitors. The philosophy of make is simple: when you change source files and want to rebuild the program or other output files, make checks the timestamps to see which ones have changed and rebuilds them as required, without wasting time rebuilding other files. However, on top of this basic principle, make provides a rich set of options, allowing you to operate across multiple directories, build different versions for different platforms, and customize your build process in other ways. The third edition of this book primarily discusses the GNU version of make, which has now become the industry standard. The book carefully discusses the various extensions of GNU make. GNU make is very popular because it is free software, offering different versions for almost every platform, including Microsoft Windows (as part of the free project Cygwin). Robert Mecklenburg—the author of the third edition of this book—has used make across different platforms and languages for decades. In this book, he enthusiastically lists how to make your builds as efficient as possible, how to reduce maintenance, avoid errors, and fully understand what make is doing. The chapters on C++ and Java provide optimized makefile entries for projects using these languages. The author even includes a discussion about the makefile used to build this book.