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I have several directories representing subparts of a project, each with its own Makefile.
I want to create a master Makefile with targets for each of those subparts, each target satisfying the following:

  • depend on a certain target from that subproject's Makefile.
    This is the tricky part.
  • copy some resulting library/executable build by the subproject into a central directory (kind of like "make install"-ing it).
    This I can already achieve using simple commands.

I could only find information about the include directive of GNU make, but that doesn't help me much as it seems not to encapsulate the rules (and execution) of the included makefile in its own directory, but instead just #includes them C-style (rather that thinking of them as packages with separate scopes).

INSTALLDIR := build
SRCDIR := src

TARGETS := projA projB
.PHONY: $(TARGETS)
TARGETS_PATH := $(addprefix $(SRCDIR)/, $(TARGETS))
MAKEFILES := $(addsuffix /osx.mak, $(TARGETS_PATH))
# include them somehow?

For such a setup as defined above, I now want each of $(TARGETS) to depend on the release target of its corresponding Makefile (something like projA: $(SRCDIR)/projA/osx.mak @ release for projA, in my own language meaning that target projA depends on the successful execution of the release target in that specific Makefile).

Is there any way to achieve this?
You can suggest other tools apart from GNU make, but the subproject makefiles are already written as makefiles.

Jens
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Dan
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  • Sorry, don't understand a word of this. are you asking about recursive make? –  Jun 02 '11 at 20:31

1 Answers1

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Have a look at recursive make.

You could do something like,

SRCDIR := src
TARGETS := projA projB
.PHONY: $(TARGETS)

$(TARGETS):
    cd $(SRCDIR)/$@; $(MAKE) release
Thomas Minor
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  • Oh I see, this does work! This is kindof what I tried at first, only I set the targets to depend on the actual files that I wanted copied. So naturally, since I couldn't make them depend on those other targets, after the first run make would just say pass cause the files were already there. Duuh – Dan Jun 02 '11 at 21:09
  • It seems like a way to go, but still feels a bit hackish in that make will end up calling all of the other makefiles and then copy over all of the results each time, even if they were not regenerated. I'm more interested in a solution that makes the global makefile aware of whether or not the subprojects changed, and only copy the files from each subproject that changed. – Dan Jun 02 '11 at 22:11
  • @Dan: to be more selective, the master makefile must know the prerequisites of the target file, which means it will probably have to `include` the lesser makefile, or at least part of it. This is workable, but you're edging toward a non-recursive makefile. – Beta Jun 03 '11 at 01:07
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    @Dan: If you want to control when you copy, you can unconditionally make the subproject (to do the dependency checking), and then call another rule that copies the file only if it's changed since it was last copied. – Thomas Minor Jun 03 '11 at 01:22