About imake

Applications Programming
1

Hi,
i am application developer, so for i am writing make file explictly. i come to know that using imake we can automatically write the make file for the project.........i am not developing any xwindow programs...
i thought that the imake is used write the make files only for xwindow programs....is that true or we can use imake for other programs also.
Thanks in advance
Sarwan

2

While imake is used primarily as a helper-tool to build some X apps, imake can certainly be used for non-X things. However, given that it's distributed as part of X, it's unlikely you're going to have it available if you don't have X installed.

I find that rolling your own makefiles is usually for the best. My experiences with generators such as autotools and imake has been vexing at best -- autotools in particular is so badly supported, breaks backwards compatibility so often, and just plain breaks in so many places that it's not worth the trouble. At least a custom makefile you can rewrite yourself when it broken.

3

To spare myself some trouble with makefiles, I generally write one like this...

# Intended for GNU make
# Prevents these targets from breaking when, say, a file named 'clean' exists
.PHONY:clean all all2

# These are used to build *.o targets
CFLAGS:=-I./include/
CXXFLAGS:=$(CFLAGS)
LDFLAGS:=-lsomething

# When you ask for a *.pic.o target, it'll use these cflags/ldflags instead of the above
LIB_CFLAGS:=$(CFLAGS) -fpic
LIB_LDFLAGS:=$(LDFLAGS) -shared

# The first target, so it gets made first, but defers to all2, which knows all targets
all:all2

# Include all makefile "modules" in the directory.
include *.makefile

# How to make objects for compilation into shared librarires
%.pic.o:%.c
        $(CC) $(LIB_CFLAGS) -c $< -o $@
%.pic.o:%.cpp
        $(CXX) $(LIB_CFLAGS) -c $< -o $@

# Cleans up all created object files and executables
clean:
        rm -f $(OBJS) $(EXETARGETS) $(LIBTARGETS)

# Build all targets
all2:$(EXETARGETS) $(LIBTARGETS)

And the makefiles that are included, look like this:

VPATH+=dir_with_code_in_it

# Describes object files for this target
# Filenames should be unique, as in, dir_with_code_in_it/foobarg_file1.c
FOOBARG_OBJS:=foobarg_file1.o foobarg_file2.o foobarg_file3.o

foobarg:$(FOOBARG_OBJS)
        $(CC) $(FOOBARG_OBJS) $(LDFLAGS) -o $@

# Add to EXETARGETS, so all2 knows about it and makes it
EXETARGETS+=foobarg

# Add to OBJS, so that clean knows what things to remove

Less pain than writing the WHOLE thing from scratch every time, less bother than using those wacky automated things.