Use sqlite to manage Makefile build flags

Question

I build for more than two dozen targets from a source tree with usually three active branches with both production and debug builds. To date I've used a personal Makefile that defines the target which includes a common Makefile that defines the compile flags which then includes the Makefile from a specific source tree. This works but I can't help but thinking there's a better way.

I'd like to use a sqlite3 database to store and organize a full list of build flags. At compile time the database would be queried to generate to generate flags based on project version, platform and dev/production and start the build.

This database would be a single place where I can document and keep track my current settings for all my development builds. A base set of stored flags would be overridden by more granular flags at version, target platform, then build quality levels.

As part of implementing something like this I would also create a handful of shell scripts to manipulate the database and get/set flags as well as permit other developers in my lab adopt this more easily.

Has this already been done? Are there any examples of something like this?

Is there a different/better way to handle this?

Two things: * I cannot modify the original project Makefiles. * Attempting to use something like automake would be cumbersome as the necessary number of configure flags to enable a debugging level in an existing module of the code base would number in the hundreds.

Answer 1

I suspect you may like to take a look at a more sophisticated build system. Take a look at ant, jam, and other build system tools. I think the standard GNU way of doing what you describe is through ./configure (autoconf) scripts, although I can see that managing the different configurations would be difficult.

Although writing your own Makefile configuration system is possible, I would suspect that if you want your code to have wider adoption, that using a more standard build system is the right answer.

Answer 2

IMHO, using a database for this is overkill. Using makefile includes is a clean and simple way to handle this. What are your concerns/issues/problems regarding this approach? Perhaps there's a way to restructure your makefiles to achieve your goals, without adding a database and without switching to a completely different build system.