this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
12 points (87.5% liked)

General Programming Discussion

7807 readers
6 users here now

A general programming discussion community.

Rules:

  1. Be civil.
  2. Please start discussions that spark conversation

Other communities

Systems

Functional Programming

Also related

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
12
GNU Make - Unconditionally run a target before any other targets (www.bahmanm.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
4 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/6856563

When writing a (GNU) Makefile, there are times when you need a particular target(s) to be run before anything else. That can be for example to check the environment, ensure variables are set or prepare a particular directory layout.

... take advantage of GNU Make's mechanism of includeing and makeing makefiles which is described in details in the manual:

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You may like an approach I came up with some time ago.

In my included file that's common among my Makefiles:

# Ensure the macro named is set to a non-empty value.
varchk_call = $(if $($(1)),,$(error $(1) is not set from calling environment))

# Ensure all the macros named in the list are set to a non-empty value.
varchklist_call = $(foreach v,$(1),$(call varchk_call,$v))

At the top of a Makefile that I want to ensure certain variables are set before it runs:

$(call varchklist_call,\
        INSTDIR \
        PACKAGE \
        RELEASE \
        VERSION)

I usually do these checks in sub-Makefiles to ensure someone didn't break the top level Makefile by not passing down a required macro.