I hate building system that don't use Makefile, or that use but don't respect the variable convention. It makes really quite annoying to do things like changing allocation library, add compilers flags, etc.
And all that just for executing a set of tasks in a DAG much slower than ninja
…until it is.
I usually reach for make because it’s simple to get a simple project built but once I start throwing stuff like source code generators at it then I have to spend a bunch of time getting the dependency tree right so I’m not chasing bugs I’ve already fixed but didn’t get recompiled. Or recompile the whole thing when I change some trivial thing.
Still, for the stuff I do, it gets the job done without too much trouble.
"Make originated with a visit from Steve Johnson (author of yacc, etc.), storming into my office, cursing the Fates that had caused him to waste a morning debugging a correct program (bug had been fixed, file hadn't been compiled, cc *.o was therefore unaffected). As I had spent a part of the previous evening coping with the same disaster on a project I was working on, the idea of a tool to solve it came up. It began with an elaborate idea of a dependency analyzer, boiled down to something much simpler, and turned into Make that weekend."
If they had rebuilt the whole project, make would not have been needed, However because they wanted to do partial builds and the manual process had downsides make was invented.
In case someone want to see all the defaults, run `make -p`.
You don't need to use tab.
.RECIPEPREFIX=>
foo:
>echo barAutotools uses Make as the backend, but so do a lot of other things too. You don't need Autotools to use Make.