On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 01:28:25PM +0100, Markus Teich wrote: > Nick wrote: > > I was reading the opengroup specifications for make(1) recently[0], > > and found that even our standard makefile practise of using 'include' > > for config variables is nonstandard, as far as they're concerned. > > Needless to say I think 'include' is a perfectly reasonable feature > > to use, and it evidently works everywhere that people care about. > > Heyho, > > Regarding the include config.mk used in various suckless projects: What is the > benefit? If a user needs to adapt it to his system, he effectively has to > edit a > file. Would there be a problem if this file would be the Makefile instead of > the > config.mk file?
It is clear separation between user-configured variables and generic code. It also makes it easy to have a configure script like as shown below: #!/bin/sh case `uname` in OpenBSD) ln config.bsd config.mk ;; *) ln config.posix config.mk ;; esac This was taken from utmp[1]. This doesn't duplicate the entire Makefile. [1] http://git.suckless.org/utmp cheers, sin