November 2004
Intermediate to advanced
302 pages
9h 7m
English
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Chapter 7. Portable Makefiles
What do we mean by a portable makefile? As an extreme example, we want a makefile that runs without change on any system that GNU make runs on. But this is virtually impossible due to the enormous variety in operating systems. A more reasonable interpretation is a makefile that is easy to change for each new platform it is run on. An important added constraint is that the port to the new system does not break support for the previous platforms.
We can achieve this level of portability for makefiles using the same techniques as traditional programming: encapsulation and abstraction. By using variables and user-defined functions we can encapsulate applications and algorithms. By defining variables for command-line arguments and parameters, we can abstract out elements that vary from platform to platform from elements that are constant.
You then have to determine what tools each platform offers to get your job done, and what to use from each platform. The extreme in portability is to use only those tools and features that exist on all platforms of interest. This is typically called the “least common denominator” approach and obviously can leave you with very primitive functionality to work with.
Another version of the least common denominator approach is to choose a powerful set of tools and make sure to bring it with you to every platform, thus guaranteeing that the commands you invoke in the makefile work exactly the same everywhere. This can be hard to ...
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