Use of Makefile

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

karina komments:

| Make files are used for managing (compiling and updating)
| software projects that have multiple files.
| One reference states:
|
|
| 'By default, when invoking a Makefile on the command line, the shell looks for a file named "Makefile" (note: uppercase) in the current working directory. Some versions also find "makefile" (note: lower case). If you want to circumvent tradition for some reason, the -f option might be used to rename Makefiles with other names that may be deemed as more meaningful. An example of naming and invoking the makefile is seen below. '
|
| prompt>make -f someothername
|
| Can someone elaborate on an example where invoking Make
| by some other name is desirable?


Sure.  Suppose you want to do compiles on a number of different kinds
of  machines, and the the differences are too great to easily do them
all with a single Makefile.  You might have a number of Makefiles:

Makefile.linux   for building on a linux system
Makefile.FreeBSD for building on FreeBSD
Makefile.solaris for building on a Sun
Makefile.HPUX    for building on an HP-UX system
and so on.

You might also use this to do compiles with different compilers and/or
libraries.

In general, you might like to also have a "Makefile" for the  benefit
of  people who like to type "make" and expect it to work.  This might
do something like trigger a "Configure" script  to  figure  out  what
sort of system it's on, and then do a second "make -f Makefile.$type"
to run a make command with the appropriate Makefile.whatever file.

You can see examples of this in a lot of "Open Source" packages, which
are very often written to compile on a number of different systems.