GNU Make

Christian Külker

0.1.0

2023-03-02

This document describes features and solutions using gmake', the GNUmake’ program. Some solutions may also work with other flavors of make, but are usually not tested (by me).

Visualize Makefile Dependencies

The first step in understanding whether a Makefile can be parallelized is to view its internal dependencies. This can be done with a tool called make2graph. The tool itself also requires a build.

Building make2graph

Building make2graph is simple: install the dependencies like dot and make and run make in the project folder.

git clone https://github.com/lindenb/makefile2graph.git
cd makefile2graph
make

This will create the binary tool make2graph.

Create a Dependency Tree

To view a dependency tree of itself do:

make all -Bnd | ./make2graph | dot -Tpng -o make2graph.png

This will create the image make2graph.png in the local directory. If the complexity of a Makefile is too high for dot instead of .png, a .svg can be created. Also, if the resulting png file cannot be viewed with display, because the size is to high, another program like eom can be used.

make all -Bnd | ./make2graph | dot -Tsvg -o make2graph.svg

View the Results

History

Version Date Notes
0.1.0 2023-03-02 Initial release
  • GNU Make