Sylvain BERTRAND writes: > Using a makefile is overkill. Should be a sh script. > > Makefiles should be used only when there are too many source > files to recompile for a build increment.
For an opinion that matters, try Kernighan & Pike (The Unix Programming Environment, pg. 241): It's a nuisance to have to type two commands to compile a new version of [our example]. Although it's certainly easy to make a shell file that does the job, there's a better way, one that will generalize nicely later on when there is more than one source file in the program. ... make is most useful when the program being created is large enough to be spread over several source files, but it's handy even for something as small as [our example]. In other words, one advantage that make provides is a simple interface for building any program, whether small or large. Said interface should not come at the cost of complexity, but good makefiles are simple anyway (the one in their example is two lines). -- Anthony J. Bentley
