cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/6863402
Fed up w/ my ad-hoc scripts to display the targets and variables in a
makefile(s), I've decided to write a reusable piece of code to do
that: https://github.com/bahmanm/bmakelib/issues/81
The first step toward that would be to understand the common commenting styles. So far I have identified 4 patterns in the wild which you can find below.
Are there any style guides/conventions around this topic? Any references
to well-written makefiles I can get inspiration from?
A
VAR1 = foo ## short one-liner comment
my-target: ## short one-liner comment
…
B
# longer comment which
# may span
# several lines
VAR1 = foo
## comments can be prefixed w/ more than #
## lorem ipsum dolor
my-target:
…
C
#####
# a comment block which is marked w/ several #s on
# an otherwise blank line
#####
VAR1 = foo
D
#####
#> # heading 1
# This is a variation to have markdown comments
# inside makefile comments.
#
# ## It's a made-up style!
# I came up w/ this style and used it to document `bmakelib`.
# For example: https://is.gd/QtiqyA (opens github)
#<
#####
VAR1 = foo
We're supposed to be commenting Makefiles?
I usually capture all my development-time "automation" in Make and Ansible files. I also use makefiles to provide a consisent set of commands for the CI/CD pipelines to work w/ in case different projects use different build tools. That way CI/CD only needs to know about
make build,make test,make package, ... instead of Gradle/Maven/... specific commands.Most of the times, the makefiles are quite simple and don't need much comments. However, there are times that's not the case and hence the need to write a line of comment on particular targets and variables.