It was originally required to build OpenOffice, but in 2009 the build system was rewritten to use GNU Make. dmake or Distributed Make that came with Sun Solaris Studio as its default Make, but not the default one on the Solaris Operating System (SunOS).In December 2006, Sun DevPro Make was made open source as part of the efforts to open-source Solaris. With SunOS-3.2, It was delivered as optional program with SunOS-4.0, SunPro Make was made the default Make program. Sun DevPro Make appeared in 1986 with SunOS-3.2.Make has gone through a number of rewrites, including a number of from-scratch variants which used the same file format and basic algorithmic principles and also provided a number of their own non-standard enhancements. Screenshot of GNU Make, an implementation of Make Makefiles were text files, not magically encoded binaries, because that was the Unix ethos: printable, debuggable, understandable stuff. Use of tools that were still wet was part of the culture.
It began with an elaborate idea of a dependency analyzer, boiled down to something much simpler, and turned into Make that weekend.
As I had spent a part of the previous evening coping with the same disaster on a project I was working on, the idea of a tool to solve it came up. Make originated with a visit from Steve Johnson (author of yacc, etc.), storming into my office, cursing the Fates that had caused him to waste a morning debugging a correct program (bug had been fixed, file hadn't been compiled, cc *.o was therefore unaffected). įeldman was inspired to write Make by the experience of a coworker in futilely debugging a program of his where the executable was accidentally not being updated with changes:
Feldman received the 2003 ACM Software System Award for the authoring of this widespread tool. It was originally created by Stuart Feldman in April 1976 at Bell Labs. There are now a number of dependency-tracking build utilities, but Make is one of the most widespread, primarily due to its inclusion in Unix, starting with the PWB/UNIX 1.0, which featured a variety of tools targeting software development tasks.