makedepend
makedepend is a Unix tool used to generate dependencies of C source files. A Windows version was made available sometime 2002 [1] and an updated one last 2007 on UnxUtils. [2]
History
makedepend
was developed as part of MIT's Project Athena. It was used extensively in building X11 and ancillary packages, but has since become superseded by the dependency generation facilities of various compilers, and is now used primarily as a worst-case fallback, e.g. by depcomp and GNU Automake.
Usage
makedepend
is invoked with a list of sourcefiles:
makedepend [options] foo.c bar.c ...
However, it is more often invoked as a target from a makefile, typically under the depend
target, such that make depend
will invoke makedepend
on all source files in the project. One such example target would be as follows:
SRCS = file1.c file2.c ...
CFLAGS = -O -DHACK -I../foobar -xyz
depend:
makedepend -- $(CFLAGS) -- $(SRCS)
Purpose
When building C language projects, it is imperative for incremental compilation (and useful for clean compilation) to be able to track dependencies between compilation units. C expresses interfaces between compilation units via header files; as such, it is often necessary to rebuild a compilation unit when a header it includes is changed. make needs to be informed of these dependencies.
makedepend
solves this problem by parsing the code of C source files to generate a list of dependencies (those header files included directly and indirectly). It is able to understand conditional compilation constructs so as to not generate excessive dependencies. It then appends rules expressing the dependencies to the Makefile.
Alternatives
Most modern compilers provide a flag (often -M
) that uses the compiler's own source parser to generate a list of dependencies. This may be preferred to makedepend
because it reduces the likelihood of the dependencies generated being at odds with the compiler's own behaviour.
Since compilers accept different flags for dependency generation, and may behave differently in outputting dependency information, it is desirable to use a wrapper script that can invoke the compiler appropriately (and fall back to makedepend
if necessary). One popular such wrapper script is depcomp, which is distributed with and used by GNU Automake.[3]
Solaris make includes support for dependency tracking that is activated by specifying the "special-function target" .KEEP_STATE
.[4]
References
- ↑ Added makedepend from X11 distribution
- ↑ UnxUtils project hosted on SourceForge
- ↑ Dependency Tracking in Automake, Automake Manual
- ↑ Solaris make(1) Man-page
- : create dependencies in makefiles – Linux User Commands Manual
- Directory where the sourcecode is available