On Thu, 28 May 2026 at 02:40, Roy J. Tellason, Sr. <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wednesday 27 May 2026 08:29:09 am Greg Wooledge wrote:
> > "make" is a tool used in software development. It has a man page: > > <https://manpages.debian.org/make> > Looked that over, then tried "info make" which had a bit more in it, > but not as much as I'd like. I have tried to read makefiles and find it > difficult to get a handle on just what's going on there. Do you know of > any other resources that might help with this? Hi, the canonical user reference for Gnu Make is the Gnu Make Manual [1]. The mailing list [2] for Make usage assistance is archived at [3]. Some key steps to understanding makefiles are: - They are *not* executed from top to bottom. - They contain two entirely different syntaxes (Make and shell). - They are parsed in at least two passes, nothing is executed in the first pass. - There is *no* workaround for the fact that space character is a token separator. So Make can *not* operate with file or directory names that contain whitespace characters. - Tab and space character are syntactically very different. So it's essential to use a viewer or editor that displays them differently. - Like many other complex tools, the best way to begin using Make is to start using it in the simplest manner possible, and then add complexity in small manageable steps. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html [2] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-make [3] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-make/
