.H 1 nmake .B nmake is the AT&T .BR nmake , first released in 1985. .B nmake is a modern variant of the traditional Feldman .B make with an important difference: .B nmake maintains state that records information for future runs. The state includes: .BL .LI file modification times .LI explicit prerequisites (from makefile assertions) .LI implicit prerequisites (from .I #include scanning) .LI action text (used to build targets) .LI variable values .LI target attributes .LE State .I and a language to manipulate it finally makes concise makefiles a reality; concise because rules traditionally placed in each makefile can now be implemented in a general way in a single .I "base rules" file. The base rules are such a fundamental part of .B nmake that most of its visible features are controlled by them. .P Most makefiles are just a few lines: .EX :PACKAGE: X11 xgame :: README xgame.6 xgame.h xgame.c xutil.c -lXaw -lXmu -lXt .EE Automatically generated .B probe information provides convenient compiler abstractions: .EX CCFLAGS = $(CC.DLL) ast 4.0 :LIBRARY: ast.c strmatch.c .EE In this case if the compiler supports shared libraries (aka \fBdll\fP\fIs\fP) then .L "nmake install" will generate .I libast.a and .I libast.so.4.0 (or the appropriate shared library suffix determined by .BR CC.SUFFIX.SHARED ). There are no .B nmake makefile generators (because the makefiles are so small), there is no separate .L "make depend" (because the files with .I .SCAN attributes are automatically scanned for implicit prerequisites), and there is no cheating (because all time stamp changes are detected, not just .IR newer-than ).
