~ $ Make Readable: Making Makefiles Readable by Actual Humans

By:

Everybody's seen it: a well-organised, mature open source project, easy-to-read code... but a Makefile that could charitably be described as "write-only". You can't blame the project author: build systems are often designed for very small projects, and get very complex as the project grows. I discuss the philosophy of the "gold standard", Make and the autotools, and why this combination makes for complicated projects. I will then present some thoughts (and code!) for a better build system, exploring ideas from some of the leading competing systems, including Jam, SCons, and Ant.

Stream: Development Tools

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale has been writing Makefiles and typing "make" on one operating system or another for many years. A graduate from the University of Technology, Sydney, he is now working on his thesis in with the ERTOS group at National ICT, Australia, on toolchain-integrated domain-specific optimisation techniques for embedded systems, where he has had opportunity to curse many build systems. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, cooking extravagant things, and having long-winded discussions on the Internet.