makefiles

These are a set of generic makefiles for handling course material and research publications in an easy manner. I started development during my first years as Lecturer in Mid Sweden University [MIUN], starting in 2011, and they were used there (and still are) by me and my colleagues. I later added some more research-paper oriented features during my doctoral studies in KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden [KTH].

They are published here under an MIT license (see the LICENSE file).

Structure and usage

The makefile structure is inspired by the BSD ports system. My experience is with the OpenBSD [OpenBSD], so my inspiration is from their adaption.

Although I'm more fond of the BSD make(1) utility, these makefiles are for GNU make(1). This is because most of my colleagues used GNU/Linux and it's easer to use gmake(1) on a BSD system than try to find the BSD make(1) in a GNU system.

The usage is to include the relevant .mk-files in your Makefile, set the variables and then build the relevant target. For example, add

INCLUDE_MAKEFILES=makefiles
include ${INCLUDE_MAKEFILES}/subdir.mk
include ${INCLUDE_MAKEFILES}/tex.mk

to the end of your Makefile. More on this in the next section.

The files on the form miun.*.mk have the old defaults for my colleagues at Mid Sweden University.

Dependencies and installation

There are three ways of using this makefile library. The first and obvious one is to download the files you need, add them to the working directory and use them in your Makefile. This can even be automated using make(1), by adding the following lines in the end of your Makefile:

INCLUDE_MAKEFILES?= .
INCLUDES=   depend.mk

define inc
ifeq ($(findstring $(1),${MAKEFILE_LIST}),)
$(1):
    wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dbosk/makefiles/master/$(1)
include ${INCLUDE_MAKEFILES}/$(1)
endif
endef
$(foreach i,${INCLUDES},$(eval $(call inc,$i)))

This will automatically download and include any files specified in the INCLUDES variable. A more trivial code snippet, but with some minor drawbacks, is this:

tex.mk depend.mk:
    wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dbosk/makefiles/master/$@

include tex.mk
include depend.mk

The make(1) utility will then realise it must make those files, and hence it'll download them to the current working directory. Then you can use the target clean-depends to clean them.

The second and better way to use this library is to use the repo as a (Git) submodule in your repository. To do this you would first add the submodule: git submodule add -b master https://github.com/dbosk/makefiles.git. Then you would add the following two lines to your Makefile:

INCLUDE_MAKEFILES=makefiles
include ${INCLUDE_MAKEFILES}/<name-of-file>.mk

Note that you need the variable INCLUDE_MAKEFILES. This variable is used internally by the different .mk-files to find their respective dependencies from the part of the tree your Makefile resides. E.g. tex.mk in turn includes depend.mk.

The third option is to install the makefiles globally on the system. To do this, just run sudo make install in the root of the makefiles repo. That will install the files into /usr/local/include, where GNU make(1) will look for them.

The dependencies for these files to work are the following programs:

• GNU make(1),
• pax(1),
• wget(1),
• unzip(1),
• latex(1),
• pdflatex(1),
• latexmk(1L),
• dia(1),
• inkscape(1), and
• LibreOffice.

Either you install these manually or they will be installed automatically when needed through the use of depend.mk. You will need sudo(8) privileges to install them.

For Mac users

Since Apple is using an old version of Info-ZIP's unzip(1) command in the OS X systems, you will be caused much grievance. By default depend.mk uses unzip -DD to extract dependencies, this causes timestamps of the extracted files to be that of extraction instead of what is stored in the zip file. The benefit of this is that the extracted files will be newer than the zip file, hence make(1) won't try to rebuild them. In the old version of unzip(1) used by OS X, the -DD option doesn't exist. As a consequence you'll be asked if you'd like to overwrite the extracted files --- every time you recompile. So if you use a Mac, run make(1) as follows:

$ UNZIP=unzip make ...