.H 1 nmake

.B nmake

is the AT&T

.BR nmake ,

first released in 1985.

.B nmake

is a modern variant of the traditional Feldman

.B make

with an important difference:

.B nmake

maintains state that records

information for future runs.

The state includes:

.BL

.LI

file modification times

.LI

explicit prerequisites (from makefile assertions)

.LI

implicit prerequisites (from

.I #include

scanning)

.LI

action text (used to build targets)

.LI

variable values

.LI

target attributes

.LE

State

.I and

a language to manipulate it finally makes concise

makefiles a reality; concise because rules traditionally placed in

each makefile can now be implemented in a general way in a single

.I "base rules"

file.

The base rules are such a fundamental part of

.B nmake

that most of its visible features are controlled by them.

.P

Most makefiles are just a few lines:

.EX

:PACKAGE: X11

xgame :: README xgame.6 xgame.h xgame.c xutil.c -lXaw -lXmu -lXt

.EE

Automatically generated

.B probe

information provides convenient compiler abstractions:

.EX

CCFLAGS = $(CC.DLL)

ast 4.0 :LIBRARY: ast.c strmatch.c

.EE

In this case if the compiler supports

shared libraries (aka \fBdll\fP\fIs\fP) then

.L "nmake install"

will generate

.I libast.a

and

.I libast.so.4.0

(or the appropriate shared library suffix determined by

.BR CC.SUFFIX.SHARED ).

There are no

.B nmake

makefile generators (because the makefiles are so small),

there is no separate

.L "make depend"

(because the files with

.I .SCAN

attributes are automatically scanned for implicit prerequisites),

and there is no cheating (because all time stamp changes

are detected, not just

.IR newer-than ).