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From: nagel@paris.ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: make & RCS
Message-ID: <897@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 7 Nov 88 19:16:39 GMT
References: <752@paris.ics.uci.edu> <810@cmx.npac.syr.edu>
Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu
Reply-To: nagel@paris.ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel)
Organization: University of California, Irvine - Dept of ICS
Lines: 35
In-reply-to: jerryp@cmx.npac.syr.edu (Jerry Peek)

In article <810@cmx.npac.syr.edu>, jerryp@cmx (Jerry Peek) writes:
|[This posting was pretty old, but I figured I'd answer since no one else
|did.  The disadvantages of reading news once a month, sigh...]
|
|In article <752@paris.ics.uci.edu> nagel@paris.ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel) writes:
|> Not having a make that knows about RCS is a real pain.  As far as I
|> can tell, I need to explicitly state dependencies between RCS/foo.c,v
|> and foo.c for all files in my project.
|
|When you say "that knows about RCS," do you mean your make doesn't have rules
|like .c,v.c defined?  That's probably too simple an explanation.
|
|Does your make understand .PREFIXES?  If it does, you can put the following
|line in your makefile.  If make doesn't find a .c,v file in the current
|directory, this tells it to check the ./RCS directory as well:
|
|	.PREFIXES: ./RCS
|
|You can add other directories (like /usr/project/RCS) at the end, too.

Yes, I don't have a make that has builtin knowledge of the RCS
directory and rcs commands.  I received several replies about this
via email and almost all said "use gnumake".  I probably will end
up doing that.  I never did hear anything about the .PREFIXES
dependency, although I heard about the VPATH variable.  You can use
this to set a search path just like the shell PATH variable.
Interestingly enough, the system I'm developing on (Sun 4 with
SunOS 4.0) has a make that has the VPATH variable mentioned in strings
output, but it is not documented and it doesn't seem to work.  Like
I said, I'll probably start using gnumake, since this is only for
my own benefit -- the distributed program will use a different makefile.

Mark D. Nagel
  UC Irvine - Dept of Info and Comp Sci | The probability of someone
  nagel@ics.uci.edu             (ARPA)  | watching you is proportional to
  {sdcsvax|ucbvax}!ucivax!nagel (UUCP)  | the stupidity of your action.