Adding VPATH Build Functionality
At the end of Chapter 2, I mentioned that I hadn't yet covered an important concept—that of VPATH builds. A VPATH build is a way of using a makefile construct (VPATH) to configure and build a project in a directory other than the source directory. This is important if you need to perform any of the following tasks:
Maintain a separate debug configuration
Test different configurations side by side
Keep a clean source directory for patch diffs after local modifications
Build from a read-only source directory
The VPATH keyword is short for virtual search path. A VPATH statement contains a colon-separated list of places to look for relative-path dependencies when they can't be found relative to the current directory. In ...
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