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Managing Projects with GNU Make

Posted by michael on from the making-trouble dept.

sarumont writes "Every Open Source developer uses or has used GNU make at some point or another. Everyone who has ever compiled a piece of Open Source software has used GNU's make. So what exactly is GNU make and how does it work? The 3rd Edition of 'Managing Projects with GNU Make' tells you all about using GNU make and more."

1 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. SCons is much better than GNU Make by Eric+Smith · · Score: 4, Informative
    I used to use GNU Make extensively, and considered myself to be reasonably close to being an expert with it. But a friend introduced me to SCons, and I've found it to be much easier to use.

    SCons has automatic dependency checking built in, supporting many kinds of source files, but if it doesn't have what you need it can be easily extended.

    SCons remembers the command line used to compile/build a given file, so it automatically figures out that it should rebuild that file if the command line arguments change. With Make it is very difficult to do that, so "make clean" is used much more often than it should be needed.

    SCons is written in Python, and the SConstruct files it uses analagously to Makefiles are fundamentally Python scripts, but you don't need to know Python to use SCons. However, if you do know Python you can easily extend SCons.

    SCons integrates well with Steven Ellis' 'nc' network compilation tool (though nc works with make also).