H. Mijail's Blog

This is not really a tutorial on makefiles; there are lots of those around the web. But most of those are very outdated, and/or follow dubious practices. You'll end up with a makefile which was OK for a make and a compiler from the 90's, maybe even around year 2000. Even the GNU make manual recommends unnecessarily complicated things, given the capabilities gcc has grown in the last decade . So, if you know how makefiles generally work (it's enough to know what a rule, a recipe and a variable is), and want to improve yours or know of better options, the following may help.

In the 60's, Freed Brooks led the development of the IBM/360 system and its OS. The experience made him write the famous The Mythical Man-Month. Turns out that Dijkstra also wrote about that system in his EWD255. And everything he complained about on that system is the standard nowadays! Sounds like he considered that a lot of the complexity that should be fixed by the computer is being dumped on the programmer; that the features touted by the IBM/360’s OS are in fact partial fixes to the bad design of the computer:

Éste era uno de esos estúpidos chistes que van por ahí, de mail en mail o incluso de whatsapp en whatsapp. Pero me resultó suficientemente tendencioso (por supuesto hacia lo buenos que son los pobrecitos de la derecha y lo malos que son los abusones de la izquierda - por qué siempre este tipo de cosas llevan esa orientación? *) que tuve que escribir una 2a versión, aún más clara sobre lo que piensan los de derecha - o al menos lo que parece que piensan los que yo conozco ;P.