Re: building emacs

[Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com>]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> You understood right. I'm the one who did not
> understand what make was doing.

make is the ever-lasting workhorse of building
all kinds of computer projects, not just
programming ones, and it is not
that complicated.

It seems every generation of programmers has
a bunch of people who tries to make a new and
better make, but it is still there while their
projects are long gone.

make has basically three components, a target,
which is the file you wish to create, its
dependencies, which are files from which it
draws data, and a shell command which will
create the target from that data. This is
specified in a Makefile.

The incremental part of it is that whenever you
create a target, make checks if the target
already exists. If it does, make goes on to
check if the dependencies has been changed
since the target was created. If they have,
obviously the target isn't up to date so the
shell command to create it is executed again.

When this principle is understood, it is just
a matter of looking up the Makefile syntax and
get going :)

For example, here is the Makefile that does my
Elisp:

    http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/emacs-init/Makefile

(It looks more complicated than it is.)

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573