ive never liked make files. my first experience was installing allegro. i think matthew should remember that one. but now that everything is installed correctly im doing fine. took me a while but its all in place. i got allegro (of course), allegrogl (for when i start to learn 3d), audlib (to load sound files as SAMPLE's that are 1/4 of the size of a wave file yet still have the same quality), and libnet (for networking).

I dont know what this thread is about anymore cuase ive only read the first 50 or so posts, but id just like to say Makefiles are incredibly simple. They are nothing more than variable declarations and dependency checks. Here is a makefile with as complex structure as you will ever see.

CODE = file.o
PROGRAM = game

${PROGRAM}: ${CODE}
   gcc ${CODE} -o ${PROGRAM}

CODE is a variable. PROGRAM is a variable. The only usefull line in there is the dependecy check which says, "If ${CODE} exists, then do whatever the next line for ${PROGRAM} is.". These concepts arent very hard and anyone who can understand the C language can certainly understand makefiles.

That being said, Makefiles become insanely complex when you add all sorts of bash command line stuff to it. That and if you dont understand the command line arguements to gcc itself then you probably wont understand the garbage written in most makefiles. Those are two different things, however, so people should stop complaining about makefiles and start complaining about gcc and bash.

Actually, Ben, I think I might be able to learn from that (I didn't know rules could have multiple commands like that). You want a scary makefile, Allegro's is still the king Well, last time I looked at it ...

Ok, i did a bad job explaining how makefiles work. I didnt know there was a difference between := and =, i just thought it was syntactical sugar to make pascal and C people happy .

Besides, the things you have mentioned dont make makefiles that much more complicated. Its definately not as hard to read a makefile as it is to read someones undocumented code even if cleanly written.

hey what about this. we dont use make files at all and use visual installers. everyone with me now, YAAAAYYYY NO MORE MAKE FILES!!! wooohoo. just open an exe and it compiles and places it in the right spot.

or how about you just change the files that are already installed.

you dont do that. you do a visual installer for a major version. not one tiny little change. you make a whole bunch of tiny changes and you put it in a patch. then if you get a whole bunch of major changes then you make a new version and put out a visual installer. you dont make a new visual installer for each little patch. you just replace the files with new ones. for yourself if your changing it you wouldnt need to use a make file, just compile it inside your project.

you can automatically compile only the things that change anyway. and you totaly dont realize what i just said. make files are nothing compared to a visual installer. if you are going to use a make file atleast have something slightly visual to do it for the people that arent as computer perfect. its so damn annoying to spend 3 hours just to get one darn thing to compile and installed. and atleast people can tell you what you need before you install if not GIVE IT TO YOU. so that way you dont have to spend forever looking for some remote thing that was made in the early 90's and never heard of again. that person just had it laying around and decided since no one else was using it they would. then theyll give out their stuff without that one essential component and give a crappy readme that might give you a broken link on where to find it. just include everything needed and only whats needed. it doesnt matter if your one file is big to download. they user will have to download everything else some other place anyway. its just so annoying to spend a whole damn day getting a few things working.

IronBob, you'd spend longer if you had to write that stuff from scratch.

Not the person designing it?

Have you ever actually needed any of that power (for scientific work, for instance)? I doubt it, because if you had, you wouldn't be so quick to dismiss those utilities.
Oh, and there's nothing specifically UNIX about most of them, other than that they are usually installed by default on UNIX workstations and need to be installed manually on Windows.

Yes they are. They're platform independent. They also work from a dumb terminal and work without further user intervention.

Poor documentation has nothing whatsoever to do with makefiles.

You really want everyone here who release their sourcecode to include the source to Allegro? Wow.
This is also a bad idea because you need to update your distribution whenever a newer version of some package comes out (unless you don't care about bugfixes, of course).

It does matter if you're on dialup and pay by the minute. If I need to download a lot of extra stuff, I'll take a box of floppies with me to university. Then there's always the chance that I in fact already have what I need, in which case I'm going to be very annoyed if I spend ten minutes downloading something I already have (again, I pay by the minute).

But that's not the makefile being platform dependant, it's just different OSs having their files in different places.
You'd have to deal with that no matter what you used really.
Unless, of course, it doesn't effect whatever you are compiling. Like the stuff I make, just games and other smaller projects. They don't care about where include files are, just so long as gcc can find them.

make and make install is no where near the only thing you have to do. i had to find unix tools, get help on how to change the make file from linux to windows, get pthreads, move and rename a bunch of make files, get some evtra thing libnet and then install it all. all of it took me about 3 hours. its ok to use a make file when you are editing the project yourself but when you put out a major version its just annoying. you know all of those "help installing allegro" threads (including mine). that would pretty much all be gone if you include all the files and a visual installer. and for those who want to change the make file just have the installer run the make file. that way others can use the make file if they want to and the computer noobs can use the visual installer.