Hi Bill, I think we're talking about two different styles of makefiles.
When I refer to NMAKE makefiles, I'm talking about writing makefiles from scratch by a human being who knows to make the makefile maintainable and readable by another human being. The problems you mention with .mak files sound like the ones you get when you use the makefiles generated by the DevStudio IDE, by using the "Export Makefile" option in the Project menu. I think it should be possible to hand craft a makefile for NMAKE that will work in VS 5, 6, and 7 environments. (I'm haven't used VS 7, so I'm assuming it has NMAKE, CL, LINK, etc.?) Folks can submit patches to NMAKE makefiles without having to worry about format differences in the Visual Studio versions. I'll volunteer to write the makefile and send it out for review. The goal would be to keep all build settings and steps in that one makefile. The trivial next step would be to generate a DSP that invokes the makefile for debug and release configurations. In these days of IDEs and automake, I feel like a caveman when I advocate writing makefiles by hand. But, they always seemed more maintainable and manageable than those DSP files. I've had to diff way too many DSP files these past several years as they entered the Windows development environments. ------- Original Message Dated: Tue, 04 Feb 2003 14:53:24 -0600 | From: "William A. Rowe, Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | | But for CVS - the .mak files get too dirty. If we really had an automake | style system ... but ah ... this really isn't practical at the moment. Believe | me I've investigated almost every cross compilation between ms and the | several faux-unix win32 environments. It just isn't that simple. | | The point is that .dsp's (VS 6.0 format) are usable in VS 5.0, 6.0, convertable | in VS 7.0 and 7.1, and trivial to extract the real .mak files by a VS 6.0 user | like you or I. The .mak files don't fit well into CVS because of the massive | changes every time you alter minor things like dependencies. | ...
