Let's say you have a Makefile with two pseudo-targets, 'all' and 'debug'. The 'debug' target is meant to build the same project as 'all', except with some different compile switches (like -ggdb, for example). Since the targets use different compile switches, you obviously need to rebuild the entire project if you switch between the two. But GNUmake doesn't naturally recognize this.
So if you type make all
you'll get
Building ...
...
Then if you type make debug
, you get
make: Nothing to be done for `debug'.
So my question is: how do you implement a clean solution in the Makefile to notice that the last build used a different pseudo-target, or different compile switches, than the one you want currently? If they are different, the Makefile would rebuild everything.
Put the build products into different directory trees (whilst keeping one copy of the source of course). That way you are always just a short compile from an up-to-date build, be it debug or release (or even others). No possibility of confusion either.
EDIT
Sketch of the above.
src := 1.c 2.c 3.c
bare-objs := ${src:%.c=%.o}
release-objs := ${bare-objs:%=Release/%}
debug-objs := ${bare-objs:%=Debug/%}
Release/prog: ${release-objs}
Debug/prog: ${debug-objs}
${release-objs}: Release/%.o: %.c # You gotta lurve static pattern rules
gcc -c $< -o $@
${debug-objs}: Debug/%.o: %.c
gcc -c $< -o $@
Release/prog Debug/prog:
gcc $^ -o $@
.PHONY: all
all: Release/prog ; echo $@ Success
.PHONY: debug
debug: Debug/prog ; echo $@ Success
(Disclaimer: not tested, nor even run through make.)
There you go. It's even -j
safe so you can do make -j5 all debug
. There is a lot of obvious boiler plate just crying out for tidying up.
Keeping variant sets of object files (as in bobbogo's solution) is probably the best way, but if for some reason you don't want to do that, you can use empty files as markers, to indicate which way you last built the executable:
%-marker:
@rm -f $(OBJECTS) *-marker
@touch $@
debug: GCCFLAGS += -ggdb
debug: SOMEOTHERFLAG = WHATEVER
all debug: % : %-marker
@echo making $@
@$(MAKE) -S GCCFLAGS='$(GCCFLAGS)' SOMEOTHERFLAG='$(SOMEOTHERFLAG)' main
There are other variants on this idea; you could have a small file containing the flag settings, which the makefile would build and include
. That would be clever, but not really any cleaner than this.
The only clean solution is to incorporate the difference into the target names.
E.g. you can define a variable $(DEBUG)
and consistently use it in all targets that depend on the compile step.