W1086 Merlin Build System
Prerequisites[edit]
Background[edit]
A Brief History of the Make Utility
Make originated with a visit from Steve Johnson (author of yacc, etc.), storming into my office, cursing the Fates that had caused him to waste a morning debugging a correct program (bug had been fixed, file hadn't been compiled, cc *.o was therefore unaffected). As I had spent a part of the previous evening coping with the same disaster on a project I was working on, the idea of a tool to solve it came up. It began with an elaborate idea of a dependency analyzer, boiled down to something much simpler, and turned into Make that weekend. Use of tools that were still wet was part of the culture. Makefiles were text files, not magically encoded binaries, because that was the Unix ethos: printable, debuggable, understandable stuff. - Stuart Feldman, The Art of Unix Programming, Eric S. Raymond 2003
Introduction[edit]
As we begin our journey through Computer Science and, in particular, programming, we'll need to learn how to build our projects. In some cases building a project (in any language) is a trivial process, in other cases it can be quite complex. The Merlin Build System abstracts away these potential complexities through a series of simple commands.
Build[edit]
In order to build any Merlin project, ensure that your current directory is either in the project root or some child directory of that root. Then execute the build command.
john-williams@codermerlin:~/Merlin$ build
Key Concepts[edit]
References[edit]
- Make Software (Wikipedia)
