Large complex make files can be daunting to read and examine. What tools are good for visualizing or otherwise examining a gnu make file?
+3
A:
There is a Perl library for building GraphViz figures from Makefiles:
http://search.cpan.org/~srezic/GraphViz-Makefile-1.15/Makefile.pm
Joe Carnahan
2010-03-05 03:29:40
I found this similarly named one and it's also good for producing png fileshttp://search.cpan.org/~agent/Makefile-GraphViz-0.18/lib/Makefile/GraphViz.pm
Johnny
2010-04-14 04:55:48
+1
A:
I don't know of a tool that can make sense of a set of makefiles. It may indeed be nearly impossible to create one as most large make based build environments are a hodge-podge of random commands, frightening macro substitution, and hugely context dependent control flow.
As an aside, I hear good things about SCons which I'm looking at because I'm involved with a system make environment which has become a maintenance nightmare in its own right.
msw
2010-03-05 03:33:03
SCons is my favorite build system, but make has one huge advantage. You can quickly write a make file to execute any program against a set of files. SCons uses various plugins for different build task, it includes plugins for common compilers, but in some cases you might have to write your own.
mikerobi
2010-03-05 03:39:58
+1
A:
I've had good success with the --print-data-base (-p) option.
Combined with --just-print (-n, --dry-run) and redirecting stdout to a file creates a new single makefile containing all the rules and variables in a generic format which you may find easier to understand.
With really bad makefiles I've gone as far as parsing this output in Perl to generate a new build system!
Martin Fido
2010-03-12 13:49:18
A:
I tried to use CPAN's visualizer and failed. So, I've written my own quick-n-dirty Makefile visualizer.
You may want to try it: http://github.com/vak/makefile2dot
vak
2010-10-08 09:58:48