In my first decade writing Makefiles, I developed the bad habit of liberally using GNU Make’s extensions. I didn’t know the line between GNU Make and the portable features guaranteed by POSIX. Usually it didn’t matter much, but it would become an annoyance when building on non-Linux systems, such as on the various BSDs. I’d have to specifically install GNU Make, then remember to invoke it (i.e. as gmake) instead of the system’s make.

I’ve since become familiar and comfortable with make’s official specification, and I’ve spend the last year writing strictly portable Makefiles. Not only has are my builds now portable across all unix-like systems, my Makefiles are cleaner and more robust. Many of the common make extensions — conditionals in particular — lead to fragile, complicated Makefiles and are best avoided anyway. It’s important to be able to trust your build system to do its job correctly.

This tutorial should be suitable for make beginners who have never written their own Makefiles before, as well as experienced developers who want to learn how to write portable Makefiles.