is there a "help" section for Makefiles ?

[chronodekar]

When installing from source, I usually follow this procedure,

./configure
make
make install

At times when I want to customize I run,

./configure --help

to figure out what I want. It gives a list of all the options the current "configure" supports.

Does anyone have any idea if there is such a thing for Makefiles?

This is useless,

make --help

All it does is give me help information about the "make" utility. Not what I'm looking for.

Why I ask, is because, when I was browsing through one of the Makefiles, I discovered a few extra options (other than the default "all:" ) that would let me just build only the parts I wanted. The sad thing is, I didn't know of this from reading either the README or INSTALL files. Is there some convention that might be followed ?

-chronodekar

 

[rm -rf /]

As far as I know there is no convention that is followed, though you could try using 'help' as a target:

$ make help

I have seen some people implement that. I don't know what parts you would want to build that aren't in 'all', usually this is achieved with the configure script, by only adding --with-xyz for the features you want/need.

 

[degibson]

Sometimes the best approach is just to look inside the configure script and/or the Makefile, and suffer through figuring out what the heck is going on.

 

[chronodekar]

Sometimes the best approach is just to look inside the configure script and/or the Makefile, and suffer through figuring out what the heck is going on.

I was afraid of this.

Thanks all the same.

-chronodekar

 

[Nothinman]

And report a bug about any options you find that aren't documented somewhere.

 

[chronodekar]

That too...

-chronodekar