Makepp can guess additional dependencies or targets for certain commands that it knows something about. This is especially importat for C/C++ compilation, where it is too error-prone to list manually all of the include files that a given source file depends on. By looking at the compilation command and the source files themselves, makepp is able to determine accurately which object files need to be rebuilt when some include file changes.
Makepp looks at the first word of your command line. (**** WARNING:
This may change soon because I think there's a better way of doing
this. ****) If it recognizes it, it uses the scanner corresponding to
that first word. Specifically, it isolates the first word and looks it
up in its table; if nothing is found, it strips off the directory
information and looks it up again. (This means that you can specify the
path to your compiler and makepp will still recognize it.) Currently,
makepp recognizes most C/C++ compiler names. It also recognizes
commands invoking sh and libtool; for these commands, it skips to
the first word in the command that's not an option and looks it up in
the table again.
If makepp thinks it's compiling a C/C++ program but can't find a scanner, it will give a warning message to let you know. This usually means that you buried your compiler command too deeply in the action for makepp to find it. For example, I have seen rules like this:
%.o: %.c
@echo Compiling $< now
@gcc -c $< $(CFLAGS) -o $@
The first word of the action here is echo, for which therer is no
scanner, so makepp will not scan for include files in this case.
%Makesubs::scanners array (see
Makesubs.pm in the distribution). Also send me email at
holt-makepp@gholt.net so I can include it in subsequent releases.
It looks at the command for -Idir options specifying the include path
or -Ldir options specifying the link path. It then scans any source
files for #include directives, and also looks at the command line to
see if there are any source files or libraries mentioned which are not
listed as dependencies. It recognizes these by their extension.
This scanner gives a warning message if files included with #include "file.h" are not found in the include path, or in the directory
containing the file which is #including, or in /usr/include. No
warning is given if a file included with #include <file.h>
is not found. makepp assumes it is in some system include directory
that the compiler knows about, and that files in system include
directories won't change.
In addition, files in /usr/include, /usr/local/include,
/usr/X11R6/include, and any other directory which is not writable are
not scanned to see what they include. Makepp assumes that these files
won't change. (If you're running as root, the writability test is
performed with the UID and GID of the directory you ran makepp from.
This is so compiling a program as an ordinary user and then doing
make install as root won't cause extra directories to be scanned.)
This is a fairly simple-minded scanner. It will get confused if you do things like this:
#ifdef INCLUDE_THIS
#include "this.h"
#endif
because it doesn't know about preprocessor conditionals. This is
usually harmless; it might cause additional extra files to be labelled
as dependencies (occasionally causing unnecessary rebuilds), or else it
might cause makepp to warn that the include file was not found. You can
either ignore the warning messages, or put an empty file this.h out
there to shut makepp up.
Libtool is a very clever compilation system that greatly simplifies
making shared libraries by hiding all the system-dependent details away
in a shell script. The only difficulty is that the library binary files
are not actually stored in the same directory as the output
file--libtool actuall creates a subdirectory, .libs, which contains
the real files. This is ordinarily not a problem, but makepp has to
know where the real binaries are if it is to link them in from a
repository. At the moment, libtool libraries (.la files) are not
linked in from repositories; they are always rebuilt if needed. Also,
makepp at the moment is not able to use the dependency information that
is stored inside the .la file itself. This will hopefully change
soon.
Makepp recognizes the following command words and skips over them
appropriately in in its search for the correct scanner:
condor_compile, echo ignore_error libtool, noecho
purify, sh.
I hope to improve the scanner interface greatly soon, so the mechanism will be changing significantly. More details later....