NAME

makepp_release_notes -- Major changes in each version of makepp

DESCRIPTION

Version 1.19 (July 2003)

Special thanks to Matthew Lovell and Chris van Engelen for lots of suggestions and tracking down problems in the code.

• Documentation was reorganized so that man pages as well as HTML pages can be produced, and a cookbook/FAQ was added (see makepp_cookbook).

• A "configure" script was added so installation is more like other software products from the user point of view.

• The $(origin ) function from GNU make is now supported.

• Target-specific variables are now supported as in GNU make, except that they do not propagate their values to dependencies.

• New functions $(find_upwards ) and $(relative_filename ) (contributed by Matthew Lovell) and $(relative_to ).

• In compilation commands, -I dir and -L dir are now supported and work just like -Idir and -Ldir.

• Recompilation of C files will now occur if a multi-line comment was inserted, or if the line numbering changed in any way. Previously it ignored newlines in computing the checksum, which meant that a change that affected debugger info might not force a recompilation.

• A bug in $(shell ) which caused it to return a null string occasionally (especially when the system was heavily loaded) was fixed.

• Unreadable files or directories suppress importing from repositories but are not matched by wildcards.

• A few other minor bugs were fixed.

Version 1.18

The most important change was support for the Cygwin build environment. You can now run makepp with the Cygwin version of perl; I do not think it will work properly with the native windows version of perl yet.

A few other bug fixes went into this release.

Version 1.10

The most important change in this version is that makepp can accept a vastly larger number of makefiles without any command line options because of some changes to the implementation of recursive make. There are a few minor improvements in the GNU make compatibility, and a slight improvement in memory usage.

There are several user visible changes:

• c_compilation_md5 is now the default signature method. This means that by default, makepp won't recompile C/C++ modules if only whitespace or comments have changed.

• A new signature method md5 has been added, which runs an MD5 checksum on the file's contents. This is not enabled by default; makepp still uses its original method (exact_match) for any files other than C/C++ source files.

Because of these changes, makepp will recompile everything the first time you run it.

Version 1.05

In addition to bug-fixes, this version has one user-visible change. The --norc-substitution command line option was introduced to allow compatible handling of whitespace in makefiles.

Version 0.99

In addition to numerous bug fixes, this version has several user-visible changes:

• Multiple targets for a rule are now treated in a way which is more compatible with old makefiles. Makepp has a heuristic algorithm for guessing whether the rule is supposed to build all targets at once or whether the rule needs to be invoked multiple times. I do not think this will break any existing makefiles, but it should allow makepp to work with many more makefiles designed for unix make.

• The --traditional-recursive-make option can be used for legacy makefiles which use recursive invocations of make in a way that didn't work with makepp's default implementation.

• Repositories now work with libtool.

• Variable settings are now allowed with the load_makefile statement and with recursive make.

Version 0.95

This version has several user-visible changes:

• A tutorial on writing makefiles for makepp has been added.

• GNU make style conditionals (ifeq/ifneq/ifdef/ifndef) are now supported, as is the $(if ) function.

• By default, the % wildcard now matches only files within a directory; %.c is now equivalent to *.c, not **/*.c. The reason for this change was that rules almost never need to use the more complicated wildcard, and it often caused unnecessary directories to be searched. You can get the old behavior by specifying --percent-subdirs on the command line. (I'm curious how people feel about this change. Please let me know if you have good reasons for it being one way or the other.)

• By default, makefiles from any directory that contains a dependency, or that is searched by a wildcard, are loaded automatically. Usually this means you don't need any load_makefile statements at all. If this causes you problems, you can turn off implicit loading of makefiles by adding --no-implicit-load to the command line. (I'm curious whether people like or dislike implicit loading of makefiles.)

• A target may now be declared phony on the same line that defines the target by using the new $(phony ) function, like this:

      $(phony all): program_1 program_2

  The $(phony ) function simply returns its arguments, but marks them as phony targets. You can still use the older syntax that looks like this:

      all: program_1 program_2
      
      .PHONY: all

  The $(phony ) function is an attempt to improve the readability of makefiles. I'd welcome other suggestions, as I'm still not entirely happy with the syntax.

Version 0.90

In order to support features like parallel make, most of the internals had to be reorganized or rewritten. The result is much cleaner and hopefully more reliable.

Bugs too numerous to mention have been fixed. In order to help ensure reliability, a test suite has been developed. It doesn't test absolutely everything yet, but it does test most things, and I hope to make it more extensive in the future. You can run it by typing makepp test in the makepp distribution directory. If an unmodified makepp fails the test suite, please let me know so I can fix it.

There are many new features:

• Repositories</a> are now supported.

• It is now possible to specify different methods for calculating and comparing file signatures. For example, you can use an MD5 checksum ignoring comments and whitespace, or you can require merely that the target be newer than the dependencies (the method that the traditional make uses).

• Makefiles are only rebuilt if they are older than their dependencies; a different signature method is used in this special case.

• Parallel builds are now supported, though this is still an experimental feature. See the -j option.

• It is now possible to write your own functions. See the sub statement and makepp_extending for details.

• Filenames with characters like colon or space are now supported with a new quoting syntax.

• Synonymous, less cryptic names for automatic variables have been introduced to encourage more readable makefiles.

• Makepp now remembers the architecture of the machine you built on, and rebuilds if the architecture is different.

• Directories can now be targets or dependencies; a previous restriction that all directories had to exist before the start of the built has been lifted.

• Makepp now writes a log file called .makepp_log explaining why it rebuilt everything. This is extremely useful for debugging.

• The usual -k option for continuing to build even when an error occurs is now supported.

• The documentation has been reorganized and extended.

There are also (unfortunately) a few incompatibilities with previous versions:

• The file format for storing information about the last build has changed. Thus makepp will insist on rebuilding everything the first time you run the new version.

  item *

  load_makefile no longer supports targets or variable settings. It now supports loading a list of makefiles rather than just one, so the -F switch is now unnecessary (and no longer documented).

• Recursive make now ignores variable settings on the command line. This is necessary to load makefiles in a consistent way.

• $(INFERRED_OBJS) is no longer supported (since it was not a well-designed interface anyway). Use the newer $(infer_objects ) function instead.

• $_ is no longer supported. Use $(foreach) instead.

• A few seldom used GNU make options such as -s, -n, and -q are no longer supported due to internal architecture changes. -n will probably be supported again in future releases.

• A man page is no longer provided since the documentation is no longer written in the perl pod format. Use the HTML documentation instead.

• The automatic clean target is no longer supported. A better way to do it is with the $(only_targets).