Software Build Systems: Principles and Experience

Chapter 2. A Make-Based Build System

One of this book’s key assumptions is that you already have experience in developing software. However, this doesn’t mean that you have experience writing your own build system, or even understanding an existing system. Many developers work on projects in which other people create and maintain the build system, or perhaps use an integrated development environment (IDE) to build at the push of a button. In either of these cases, you may not see the underlying build system.

This chapter introduces a build system for a small C-language program with only five source files. The build system is implemented using GNU Make [16] syntax, not only because it’s an extremely popular tool, but also because Make syntax helps ...