leostera/making-makefiles

A small set of koans to learn about Makefiles

Making Makefiles

A brief Lunch & Learn about Makefiles

Clone from: https://github.com/ostera/making-makefiles

by @ostera

History

Make was created a long time ago. It's been around since 1976.

Before Make there used to come bundled both make and install shell scripts that would help building and installing the project.

Lastly, it's ultimate purpose was to abstract out dependency tracking, allow for composability of targets, and handling of files/archives.

Trivia

1. It has at least 4 rewrites (bmake, pmake, fmake, nmake)
2. Was created at Bell Labs by Stuart Feldman
3. Fedlman got the 2003 ACM Software System Award for it

Composition

Targets

• Typically define files in the file system
• Are checked for modification time
• May have Dependencies (Other Targets)

Composition

Variables

• Can be input from the outside world
• Can have default values
• Can be exported for scripts and other makefiles

Hands-On

We need to know 3 things:

1. We invoke a target by naming it: make target-name
2. We specify a different makefile with the flag -f path/to/makefile
3. The file extension is just a convention

Without further ado...

The End

Questions?