Software Build Systems: Principles and Experience

Chapter 5. Subtargets and Build Variants

So far, this book has assumed that each piece of software has its own unique build process. That is, it’s assumed that there’s only one way each source file is compiled and linked into an executable program and that only one type of release package can be generated. In reality, though, any number of variants can exist, each using a slightly modified build process and creating a slightly different release package. The word slightly indicates that the build process should still generate the same general program, but the behavior of that program could vary in a few minor ways.

The big picture (see Figure 5.1) has been drawing a one-to-one mapping from the source tree to the object tree. In practice, many ...