"Portable" conditionalization of Makefiles

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2018, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

>
>
> I have a pile of (mostly) C code that I wrote myself over the past
> several years.  I developed it on FreeBSD but have always thought
> that it would be Nice if it compiled and ran also on Linux.
>
> I just spent about a day editing the various files to make it all
> compile and link OK on Linux.  So that part is all done now.  But
> here's the one remaining problem:
>
> There's a chance that I may distribute this stuff someday.  When and
> if I do, I'd like to be able to tell people to "just run make" in the
> top-level directory, regardless of whether they are on Linux or *BSD.
> (I -could- just tell people to use gmake if they are on *BSD, but I'd
> rather not.)
>

Why not concatenate all the C code (including the library) into a single 
large file and let people just compile it on whatever system they have? 
Make is for developers, so that they can avoid compiling everything when 
they change a small routine. But your users are not developers, and don't 
recompile every day, so they don't benefit from make, it only introduces 
an incompatibility.

daniel feenberg