Gnu Makefile - Handling dependencies

Question

What approach do C++ programmers on Unix platform use to create and manage Makefiles?

I was using hand made Makefiles for my projects but they don\'t handle header file

Answer 1

I use BSD make (pmake?) which does lot of work for me (my lang is C, but I think no difference here). This is my common 'local.prog.mk', I never change it:

.PHONY: tags .depend

# .depend depends only on $(SRCS) in bsd.dep.mk, so we can't track changes of
# header's own dependencies properly. so .depend is .PHONY target here.

CSTD    ?=c99
WARNS   ?=9
.if !empty(PC_LIST)
PC_CF   !=pkg-config --cflags $(PC_LIST)
PC_LD   !=pkg-config --libs   $(PC_LIST)
.endif
CFLAGS  +=$(PC_CF) -fgnu89-inline
.if !defined(NO_DEBUG)
CFLAGS  +=-O0 -ggdb3
.endif
LDFLAGS +=$(PC_LD)
CTAGS   =exctags

NO_MAN=
NO_OBJ=
CLEANFILES+=$(PROG).core

.include 
$(PROG): $(SUBDIR)
build: clean cleandepend depend all
run: $(PROG)
    ./$(PROG)

Note 'bsd.prog.mk' inclusion -- this handles all, build, depend, clean targets. Project-specific BSDmakefiles are simple:

.SILENT:

PROG    =hello
SRCS    =hello.c world.c
PC_LIST =gtk+-2.0 gnet-2.0

.include "../local.prog.mk"

proto:
    cproto -siv `pkg-config --cflags $(PC_LIST)` $(SRCS) > prototypes
CLEANFILES+=prototypes

I just make depend every time I insert/remove any #include directives.