Re: [PLUG] C/Makefile Online Documentation

[ziggy@panix.com]

> |As for ORA's Make book, it's actually quite old.  It spends a lot
> |of time talking about differences between various berkeley and system V
> |make implementations, as well as a handful of other (once) commonly used
> |make(1) replacements.  All in all, that book is primarily of historical
> |interest at this point in time.  (Yes, I bought a copy before coming to
> |this conclusion, unfortunately.)
> 
> Gee, when I bought my copy six years ago, it was pretty handy... ;)  

Well, the current edition came out in 1991, back when *NIX was full
of infighting and Win* was an annoying mosquito on the warpath.  :-)

> I
> didn't realize things had changed so much (I've been stuck in various IDEs
> for so long, I can't remember the last time I wrote a makefile :( ).

We have some makefiles at work that only run with GNU Make 3.77; they 
require features that weren't present in 3.76 (or require bugfixes against
3.76, I'm not sure which).

Realistically speaking, the make manpage/GNU make info doc is quite 
very good at describing the 10-20% of the features you need 80-90% of the time.

If you really want to play around with the more arcane features of modern
make's, there really isn't a good dead trees reference other than the
printed version of the GNU docs.  If you need those features, it's
a good sign you're doing something wrong or doing something strange.

As for IDEs, letting them manage makefiles for you isn't necessarily 
a bad thing (if they do a good job of it).  Debugging Makefiles isn't
the most pleasant of tasks...

Z.


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