Automatic generation of make dependencies

Abstract

In the UNIX environment, it is standard practice to use the make program to keep a system of interrelated modules up to date. When text files contain so‐called include statements referring to additional text files whose contents are to replace the statements, it soon becomes impractical, in a growing system, to manually maintain all make dependencies implied by these references. Therefore, the dependencies are often generated automatically from extracted include statements by various methods. However, the methods we have seen in use are too simplistic and either generate the wrong set of dependencies, or give only partial support. This paper describes an algorithm that can be used to generate make dependencies implied by include statements from a wide class of include mechanisms.

Exploiting Persistence in Build Management

“…Based on pattern matching, simple methods have been developed for generating Make descriptions of such dependencies. 33 A class of tools have been developed that exploit such methods and feature automatic generation of Makefiles or provide information necessary to maintain them. Most of these tools support Makefile descriptions for C and are based on the C preprocessor macro language.…”

Safeness of Make-Based Incremental Recompilation

“…Essentially the method is to scan source files for dependent-on files, assuming compliance with suffix conventions for C, yacc, etc. Walden's [14] analysis showed that a number of tools did not generate (in our terminology) complete rules for targets with dependencies that were derived targets. Our notion of build rules supplements Walden's work because our notion of (rule) completeness is defined formally and independently of C, and so provides a stronger basis for arguing the correctness of makefile generators based on, say, the rectified algorithm proposed by Walden.…”

“…In restrospect it can be seen that Stuart Feldman's original paper on make [3] tacitly assumed that makefile rules satisfy properties that guarantee safeness. Walden [14] pointed to errors in makefile generators for C and related tools, in particular in rules whose dependencies were derived files (as opposed to source files), and proposed new algorithms for such generators.…”