Re: Make utility - views/opinions sought

GNU make is pretty standard; therefore you have quite a bit of choice re documentation.

One port of the GNU tools to DOS/Windows is DJGPP:

I've used this with no real problems.

Steve

"Robert Manktelow" wrote in news:bfo641$h1ard$ snipped-for-privacy@ID-165405.news.uni-berlin.de:

I personally just use nmake from Microsoft. Why fight city hall. It works pretty well and documentation can be found for it if you google hard enough.

I've had good luck with the make that comes with WinAVR. I think it's the MingW version. Also comes with html documentation and a host of other utilities that almost make Windoze a reasonable development platform. I normally avoid long file names, but it handled "delaytest.*" without any problems.

I also found a gnu_mak_man.pdf on the net somewhere (I don't remember). But it's written for 3.75 beta (I'm running 3.78.1), and it's painfully slow to draw pages in Acrobat, but it might be nice for a printed copy.

The "less" that comes with Cygwin works better than the one that comes with WinAVR, though, and I still use that.

Regards,

-=Dave

Microsoft NMAKE works OK. The documentation can be found in online help in Visual Studio

The problem with this is there's no automatic dependency searching, so you either need to maintain it manually, or use some other utility to search your source files and recurse into headers to find 'em all.

I've been using, happily, the make from the MKS toolkit for years and years. I'm still at ver 5.1a -- haven't seen any need to upgrade. Their current offerings are rather pricey but the quality is (or, at least, was) quite good.

Try "scons", a fantastic replacement for "make", which -- amongst other things -- automatically maintains dependencies for you:

You may also want to look at its sibling, "cons":

I'm not sure which one is best these days; I think scons is.

Christer Ericson Sony Computer Entertainment, Santa Monica

Thanks to all of you for your responses. I will now go off and do some research - much appreciated.

Robert

A couple of people mentioned the problem of generating dependancies automatically in this thread. This not a Make feature (probably because it's language dependant) but a (pre)compiler feature. Look the doc for the -M option of gcc precompiler (pass -MM to gcc), which outputs dependancies in a form you can directly include in a Makefile.

Viel Spaß Martial

Robert Manktelow schrieb:

I can provide some insight here. I'm the project founder/lead for SCons, so I may have some bias, but I was also the principal coder for Cons during the last few years of its active life, so I know both tools and projects well. In general, SCons is the way to go. Cons is essentially a dead project at this point, but SCons is thriving and has a growing user community.

As a descendant of the Cons design, SCons corrects many of its architectural shortcomings. SCons supports a virtual superset of the Cons functionality and then some, and is more easily extensible. See the SCons web site for a good overview of what it can do. Notably for many people, SCons supports parallel builds on all systems, including win32. Cons would be difficult to parallelize without a major architectural overhaul.

The only thing to recommend Cons these days is if you can't stomach Python, and prefer Perl to the point where you can live with a tool that will not have any active development or bug fixes done on it. SCons and Cons configuration files are Python and Perl scripts, respectively, from which you make function calls to establish dependencies, etc. Being able to specify your build configuration using a full scripting language greatly simplifies a lot of thorny build issues.

Christer, thanks for mentioning SCons and Cons; I'm glad that SCons seems to be helping you.

--SK

-M and -MM are cool, but -MMD is even better. Use it to create a makefile fragment with the dependencies for each file as you compile it, and GNU make's conditional include to get them used:

ifneq ($(wildcard *.d),) -include $(wildcard *.d) endif

(or play a similar trick by transforming the makefiles list of Sources into one of .d files...)

Or, for small and simple projects, just have GCC make dependencies in a separate run using the magic environment variable DEPENDENCIES_OUTPUT:

depend: $(RM) deps $(MAKE) DEPENDENCIES_OUTPUT=deps clean all

-include deps

This requires an explicit "make depend" from time to time, though...

FWIW, Paul D. Smith (who took over maintenance of GNU make from Roland McGrath) describes "Advanced Auto-Dependency Generation" here:

It uses a means similar to what you describe above, but addresses issues like having to perform the explicit "make depend".

-- Dan Henry

That will come as a big surprise to my co-workers and I who use Opus Make daily on Win 2K. Maybe it's time to get an updated version?

--Gene