Re: Are makefiles intended to be portable across platforms?

[John Graham-Cumming]

On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 00:05 +0300, Angel Tsankov wrote:
> Am I taking a bad path if I try to write one makefile to manage (e.g., build 
> & clean) a project on a couple of platforms?
> I'm asking this question, 'casue makefiles seem not to be very portable, 
> right?
> For example, to define a clean target one might have to write:
> 
> clean: ; if exist OutputFiles rmdir /S /Q OutputFiles
> 
> or
> 
> clean: ; if exist OutputFiles rmdir OutputFiles -R
> 
> depending on the platform that make is run on.

The Make language definitely has some "Unix" roots (e.g. the use of
space as a list separator), but I've written some pretty successful
cross platform Makefiles, and so have many others.

You could read my article on Cross-Platform Builds in Dr Dobbs January
2005 (you'll find a free copy of the article here: http://www.electric-
cloud.com/resources/).

Make itself is cross-platform.

John.
-- 
John Graham-Cumming

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