The makefile

A very basic makefile to build our startup application describes the final target (image.bin) and the intermediate steps required to build it. Makefile syntax is in general very vast, and covering all the functions provided by Make is outside the scope of this book. However, the few concepts explained here should be sufficient to get up and running on automating the build process.

The typical syntax to define a target in the makefile is:

target: dependencies    recipe

A target is the name of the output file being built, followed by :. Dependencies are input files, expected to be found, and checked for existence when Make is invoked. If any of the files listed among dependencies is not available, or is newer than the target itself, ...

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