Managing Projects with GNU Make, 3rd Edition

Preface

The Road to the Third Edition

My first exposure to make was as an undergraduate at Berkeley in 1979. I was thrilled to be working with the “latest” equipment: a DEC PDP 11/70 with 128 kilobytes of RAM, an ADM 3a “glass tty,” Berkeley Unix, and 20 other simultaneous users! Once, when an assignment was due, I remember timing how long it took to log in—five minutes from typing my username until I got a prompt.

After leaving school, it was 1984 before I got to work on Unix again. This time it was as a programmer at NASA’s Ames Research Center. We purchased one of the first microcomputer-based Unix systems, a 68000 (not a 68010 or 20) that had a megabyte of RAM and Unix Version 7—with only six simultaneous users. My last project there was an interactive satellite data analysis system written in C with a yacc/lex command language, and, of course, make.

By 1988, I had gone back to school and was working on a project to build a spline-based geometric modeler. The system consisted of about 120,000 lines of C, spread across 20 or so executables. The system was built using makefile templates that were expanded into normal makefiles by a hand-rolled tool call genmakefile (similar in spirit to imake). The tool performed simple file inclusion, conditional compilation, and some custom logic to manage source and binary trees. It was a common belief in those days that make required such a wrapper to be a complete build tool. Several years earlier, I had discovered the GNU project and GNU