Chapter 7. Portable Makefiles

What do we mean by a portable makefile? As an extreme example, we want a makefile that runs without change on any system that GNU make runs on. But this is virtually impossible due to the enormous variety in operating systems. A more reasonable interpretation is a makefile that is easy to change for each new platform it is run on. An important added constraint is that the port to the new system does not break support for the previous platforms.

We can achieve this level of portability for makefiles using the same techniques as traditional programming: encapsulation and abstraction. By using variables and user-defined functions we can encapsulate applications and algorithms. By defining variables for command-line arguments and parameters, we can abstract out elements that vary from platform to platform from elements that are constant.

You then have to determine what tools each platform offers to get your job done, and what to use from each platform. The extreme in portability is to use only those tools and features that exist on all platforms of interest. This is typically called the "least common denominator" approach and obviously can leave you with very primitive functionality to work with.

Another version of the least common denominator approach is to choose a powerful set of tools and make sure to bring it with you to every platform, thus guaranteeing that the commands you invoke in the makefile work exactly the same everywhere. This can be hard to pull off, both administratively and in terms of getting your organization to cooperate with your fiddling with their systems. But it can be successful, and I'll show one example of that later with the Cygwin package for Windows. As you'll see, standardizing on tools does not solve every problem; there are always operating system differences to deal with.

Finally, you can accept differences between systems and work around them by careful choices of macros and functions. I'll show this approach in this chapter, too.

So, by judicious use of variables and user-defined functions, and by minimizing the use of exotic features and relying on standard tools, we can increase the portability of our makefiles. As noted previously, there is no such thing as perfect portability, so it is our job to balance effort versus portability. But before we explore specific techniques, let's review some of the issues of portable makefiles.