BuildTools

The Main Directory Makefile.am File

The purpose of the Makefile here is to recurse into the source code directories to compile the code, to do the project specific installations, and to provide a test target to run the project’s unit test (if available).

A typical COIN-OR project main subdirectory Makefile.am file looks like this example taken from Clp:

# Copyright (C) 2006 International Business Machines and others.
# All Rights Reserved.
# This file is distributed under the Eclipse Public License.
#
# Author:  John Doe              IIM    2011-04-01

include BuildTools/Makemain.inc

One should always start with a copyright note and author information.

The include of BuildTools/Makemain.inc defines

targets that install AUTHORS(.md), README(.md), LICENSE(.md), if available,
targets to build documentation via doxygen and installing and uninstalling it, and
variables that hold the name of the directories where to install header files, data, documentation, and pkg-config files. If you need any of these, then add this include to your Makefile.am file.

########################################################################
#            Subdirectories and installation of .pc files              #
########################################################################

SUBDIRS = src

pkgconfiglib_DATA = clp.pc

# Build OsiClp only if Osi is available.
if COIN_HAS_OSI
  SUBDIRS += src/OsiClp
  pkgconfiglib_DATA += osi-clp.pc
endif

In the SUBDIRS variable we specify the subdirectories into which to recurse in order to compile the libraries, programs, and whatever other products this project has to offer. In this examples, is is always the src directory. If Osi is also available (COIN_HAS_OSI is an automake conditional defined in configure), then we also recurse into the src/OsiClp directory. Alternatively, one could have specified OsiClp as subdirectory in src/Makefile.am.

The pkgconfiglib_DATA variable specifies the pkg-config configuration files that should be installed in directory $(pkgconfiglibdir) (typically $prefix/lib/pkgconfig). The files specified here will be installed by make install and removed again by make uninstall. The pkg-config configuration files are used to communicate project dependencies, compiler flags, and linker flags between projects.

########################################################################
#                           Extra Targets                              #
########################################################################

test: all
	cd test; $(MAKE) test

unitTest: test

clean-local: clean-doxygen-docs
	if test -r test/Makefile; then cd test; $(MAKE) clean; fi

install-exec-local: install-doc

uninstall-local: uninstall-doc uninstall-doxygen-docs

.PHONY: test unitTest

The test (and unitTest) target, which first makes sure that everything has been compiled (since it depends on all), changes into the test subdirectory, where it runs the test target. If the project does not provide a unit test, this should of course not be there.

The clean-local, install-exec-local, and uninstall-local targets are special Automake targets. They are “called”, when the user does a “make clean”, “make install”, and “make uninstall”, respectively. It allows us to specify additional actions for those default targets.

Here, we want to make sure that the test subdirectory is cleaned as part of the clean target; by default it is not, since it is not included in the SUBDIRS variable because the ALWAYS_FALSE Automake conditional is always false. The command line simply checks if the Makefile in the test subdirectory exists, and if it does, the corresponding target is made.

Further, we redirect to targets for installation, uninstallation, and cleaning of doxygen documentation and AUTHORS, README, and LICENSE files. Note, that doxygen documentation is not build or installed by any of these targets, thus a user is required to manually call “make install-doxygen-docs”.

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