Makefiles from the Ground Up

avikdas.com

4 points·akdas··4 comments

I'm a big fan of understanding the tools in our ecosystem, whether or not we use those tools directly. Make is one such tool that I initially used by copying other people's Makefiles, tweaking little bits and pieces to suit my needs. Only when I sat down and learned what Make offers out of the box did I grok those Makefiles I was using.

I know people might use tools like CMake, instead of writing Makefiles directly. However, it's still good to know this important part of the Unix ecosystem.

(I was inspired to submit this to HN based on the discussion around "An opinionated approach to GNU Make": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21812656 - a fantastic article, but one you get a lot more out of if you understand the basics first.)

This would be a great introduction if it specified at the top that it pertained to GNU make. I had suspected as much, but I wasn't able to confirm for sure until I got to the end and saw that you linked to the GNU make manual for further reading.

I'll throw you an upvote anyway because I suspect most of your target audience is using the GNU toolchain, and because you posted this on your own website instead of using Medium. :)

Thanks! You're absolutely right about not being upfront about being GNU Make-specific. I edited the post to mention it, and I also edited the follow-up post to say the same.

Thanks. That'll make things a little easier for BSD newbies getting familiar with make.

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