My rule is invisible when declared in a sub makefile - linux

These are simplified examples of my question.
I have:
Makefile in top/sub/sub/dir:
THINGSTODO := dothis
dothis:
#echo Do cool stuff
Main makefile in top dir:
all: $(THINGSTODO)
#echo do important stuff
Makefile in the sub dirs get included automatically.
If I run this (make all) I get:
No rule to make target 'dothis', needed by 'all'.
My conclusion is that the variable THINGSTODO gets a value but for some reason the rule "dothis" is not visible.
If I place the "dothis" rule in the main makefile it works like a charm.
But I don't want to change the main makefile, I just want to add a rule, in the sub/sub/dir makefile, that is executed before the "all" rule is executed.
I must be missing a vital bit of knowledge to solve this. Any suggestions?
Thanks.
system: Linux 4.18.13-100.fc27.x86_64
make: GNU Make 4.2.1 (Built for x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu)

Related

Why does GNU Make try to compile an object file that doesn't exist, for a rule without a recipe?

If you run make test on the following Makefile (with an otherwise empty directory):
test.%:
#echo $*
test: test.dummyextension
you get the following output:
dummyextension
o
cc test.o test.dummyextension -o test
clang: error: no such file or directory: 'test.o'
clang: error: no such file or directory: 'test.dummyextension'
clang: error: no input files
make: *** [test] Error 1
Why?
I suspect it has something todo with implicit rules, but I searched make -p on my machine, and can't find any implicit rules that match %: %. I would expect the output to simply be dummyextension, but it's almost like there's a phantom test.o file in my directory (despite my checking ten times that there is not).
If you put a ; after the test.dummyextension prerequisite, or add any content to the test rule, everything works as expected. This is the minimal failing example I can come up with, and I haven't a clue why you'd see this behaviour. Any ideas?
Make can chain multiple rules to create a target. In this case it has the following built-in rule:
%: %.o
$(LINK.o) $^ $(LOADLIBES) $(LDLIBS) -o $#
This tells make that it can make test if it can find a way to make intermediate file test.o. So now it looks for a way to make test.o and it sees your pattern rule test.%:, which matches with stem o. So it has found a way!
You have also told make that test needs test.dummyextension, so it looks for a way to make that and again the pattern test.%: matches, this time with stem dummyextension.
So make first runs the test.% recipe twice to make the two prereqs. Then it runs the %: %.o recipe to make the final target. The $^ in the recipe is all prerequisites, so both test.o, gained from the built-in pattern rule, and test.dummyextension, gained by the explicit dependency in your Makefile, appear in the command.
You can test this by using the -r flag to disable built-in rules and then add the above pattern rule manually to your Makefile.
The key points to understand here are:
A line of the form:
test: test.dummyextension
Only adds a dependency to a target. It is not a rule to make the target. That can come from elsewhere. Make does not see this and decide test should be created with a blank recipe.
A stanza of the form:
test: test.dummyextension
;
This is a rule to make the target. Being an explicit rule it has a higher priority than a pattern rule that might also match. This does tell make it has found the rule to make test using the recipe ; and it stops looking for another rule.
Make will search for an implicit rule to make any target if it does not find an explicit one. If you don't want it to do this, you can either give it an explicit rule, like above, or declare the target as phony, with .PHONY: target. Implicit rules are not searched for phony targets.

Makefile rule with percent symbol is not evaluated

I'm trying to port linux kernel's kconfig util to my product
while compiling I got next error:
make[6]: *** No rule to make target `zconf.tab.c', needed by `zconf.tab.o'. Stop.
I found next rule in Makefile.lib for this file
$(obj)/%: $(src)/%_shipped
$(call cmd,shipped)
It looks ok for me and it just works in kernel but not in my product.
Then I added another rule right after previous one.
$(obj)/%c: $(src)/%c_shipped
$(call cmd,shipped)
And now it works just fine.
Can someone explain me what's wrong with original rule?
In my case obj=. and src=. (both = dot). Current dir contains appropriate *_shipped file.
My guess is that $(obj)/%: $(src)/%_shipped qualifies as a match-anything pattern rule. (The manual doesn't mention how targets and prerequisites with with directory components are handled, but it would make sense.)
Note the following in the manual:
A non-terminal match-anything rule cannot apply to a file name that indicates a specific type of data. A file name indicates a specific type of data if some non-match-anything implicit rule target matches it.
Since there are already built-in implicit rules for creating .c files (using parser generators for example), the match-anything rule is never considered.
The reason the error doesn't happen for the kernel makefiles is that they run make with -r, which eliminates built-in implicit rules. It's done in the top-level makefile by setting the MAKEFLAGS variable:
# Do not use make's built-in rules and variables
# (this increases performance and avoids hard-to-debug behaviour);
MAKEFLAGS += -rR
As a simple experiment, I created a file test.c_foo and the following makefile:
MAKEFLAGS += -r
%: %_foo
#echo building
make test.c without the first line gives
make: *** No rule to make target 'test.c'. Stop.
With the first line, it prints "building" instead.

Create custom ./configure command line arguments

I'm updating a project to use autotools, and to maintain backwards compatibility with previous versions, I would like the user to be able to run ./configure --foo=bar to set a build option.
Based on reading the docs, it looks like I could set up ./configure --enable-foo, ./configure --with-foo, or ./configure foo=bar without any problem, but I'm not seeing anything allowing the desired behavior (specifically having a double dash -- before the option).
Any suggestions?
There's no way I know of doing this in configure.ac. You'll have to patch configure. This can be done by running the patching script in a bootstrap.sh after running autoreconf. You'll have to add your option to the ac_option processing loop. The case for --x looks like a promising one to copy or replace to inject your new option, something like:
--foo=*)
my_foo=$ac_optarg ;;
There's also some code that strips out commandline args when configure sometimes needs to be re-invoked. It'll be up to you to determine whether --foo should be stripped or not. I think this is probably why they don't allow this in the first place.
If it were me, I'd try and lobby for AC_ARG_WITH (e.g. --with-foo=bar). It seems like a lot less work.
in order to do that you have to add to your configure.ac something like this:
# Enable debugging mode
AC_ARG_ENABLE(debug,
AC_HELP_STRING([--enable-debug],[Show a lot of extra information when running]),
AM_CPPFLAGS="$AM_CPPFLAGS -DDEBUG"
debug_messages=yes,
debug_messages=no)
AC_SUBST(AM_CPPFLAGS)
AC_SUBST(AM_CXXFLAGS)
echo -e "\n--------- build environment -----------
Debug Mode : $debug_messages"
That is just a simple example to add for example a --enable-debug, it will set the DEBUG constant on the config.h file.
then your have to code something like this:
#include "config.h"
#ifdef DEBUG
// do debug
#else
// no debug
#endif

Why the variables in linux kernel's Makefile did not work?

The kernel Makefile init the variables like KBUILD_OUTPUT outside any target's make process. The code is like this:
ifeq ("$(origin O)", "command line")
KBUILD_OUTPUT := $(O)
endif
But when I try to output KBUILD_OUTPUT in the target's make process, for example, the target help, I find it is not defined. The code I modified is like this:
help:
#echo 'KBUILD_OUTPUT: ${KBUILD_OUTPUT}'
When I execute make O=../build help, the KBUILD_OUTPUT variable is empty. I want to know when will it init?
Thanks a lot.
Update
However, when I just write a Makefile with this:
ifeq ("$(origin O)", "command line")
KBUILD_OUTPUT := $(O)
endif
help:
#echo 'KBUILD_OUTPUT: ${KBUILD_OUTPUT}'
Then I run make O=../build help, I will see KBUILD_OUTPUT: ../build.
Is there anything special in kernel's Makefile?
The kernel make process is a bit more complicated than most makes. The main kernel makefile will recursively call itself (that is, it calls make specifying itself as the makefile, but giving different target sets). Because of this, large portions of the main kernel Makefile has conditionals around them, some parts meant to be executed when the Make is first invoked, and others which are meant to be executed when the makefile is invoked as a child of itself. The code you are quoting, is actually:
ifeq ($(KBUILD_SRC),)
# OK, Make called in directory where kernel src resides
# Do we want to locate output files in a separate directory?
ifeq ("$(origin O)", "command line")
KBUILD_OUTPUT := $(O)
endif
When you create the help target, the Makefile will run only that rule, and thus not recursively call itself, and therefore, KBUILD_SRC will not be set, and thus KBUILD_OUTPUT will remain unset.
John

Recursive make is recursing too much and requires a dummy prerequisite

I have a very simple Makefile that isn't doing what I expect it would do. The ultimate goal is that it should call itself recursively, including the appropriate file each time, resulting in a build specific to what was included (I'm building several projects that all share the same code base, but utilize different combinations of the source files). I've never really dealt with recursive calls to make, so I must be missing something obvious. At the moment, I only have one .mk file in the same folder as my Makefile. It's a simple one-liner just for the purposes of this test. It will eventually contain various per-project settings.
Makefile:
SHELL = /bin/sh
ifdef MYFILE
include $(MYFILE)
PROGRAM = $(basename $(MYFILE))
endif
all: $(wildcard *.mk)
dummy:
#echo -- Entering dummy stub ... why do I need this?
%.mk: dummy
#echo Calling $(MAKE) MYFILE=$# $*
$(MAKE) MYFILE=$# $*
$(PROGRAM): objs
#echo Time to link!
objs:
#echo Building objs!
test.mk
SOMEVAR = SomeValue
I have the following two problems:
Problem 1
If I remove the dummy prerequisite from my pattern rule, the pattern rule never gets called (I get the dreaded 'Nothing to be done for all' error). Is there a way I can get the recipes under the %.mk rule to run without needing that dummy prerequisite?
Problem 2
Given the two aforementioned files, I would expect make to do the following:
make[1] starts and hit the all rule
make[1] jumps down to the %.mk pattern rule
make[1] calls itself recursively (the call would look like make MYFILE=test.mk test)
make[2] starts, includes the test.mk file, and sets up the PROGRAM variable
make[2] jumps down to the $(PROGRAM) rule (since we were explicitly called with that target)
make[2] jumps to the objs rule, runs the recipes, and returns back up the chain
In actuality, make gets stuck on the %.mk pattern rule and enters an infinite loop. I don't understand why it's insisting on hitting the pattern rule, when I explicitly told it to build test in my first recursive call (which should correspond to the $(PROGRAM) target). What am I missing here?
Problem 0:
This is overdesigned. You don't need to use recursive Make here.
Problem 1:
The reason Make doesn't try to rebuild test.mk (without a dummy preq) is that test.mk is up to date. A better approach is to switch to a static pattern rule and use PHONY:
MKS = $(wildcard *.mk)
.PHONY: $(MKS)
$(MKS): %.mk:
#echo Calling $(MAKE) MYFILE=$# $*
$(MAKE) MYFILE=$# $*
An even better approach is not to use the name of a real file as a target of a rule that doesn't rebuild (or even "touch") that file.
Problem 2:
In make[2], the makefile includes test.mk. If a makefile includes another file, Make will attempt to rebuild that file before doing anything else. If there is a rule for that file (which there is) and if it succeeds (which it does) Make then reinvokes itself.
You should reconsider this design from the ground up. There are many ways to get the behavior you're looking for, depending on the specifics (how many variable will be defined in a foo.mk? do you really want to manage the build by manually moving those files around? and so on).
P.S. Here's one kludge that springs to mind. Whether it suits your case depends on the specifics:
makefile:
# includes nothing
%.mk: dummy
#echo Calling $(MAKE) MYFILE=$# -f $# $*
$(MAKE) MYFILE=$# -f $# $*
test.mk:
SOMEVAR = SomeValue
include makefile

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