README.md

Using peru with make

[Editor's node: The dude who wrote this doesn't actually know very much about make. If he screwed anything up, please file a bug!]

Getting peru and make to play nicely together can be a little tricky. Here are a few examples, going roughly from the simplest to the most correct.

For these examples, we'll pretend that we want to fetch a Hello World C program, compile it, and run it. The leachim6/hello-world project offers a Hello World example in every language, so we'll get our code from there. Here's the peru.yaml file to fetch just their C example (c.c) into the root of our project

imports:
    helloworld: ./

git module helloworld:
    url: https://github.com/leachim6/hello-world
    pick: c/c.c
    export: c/

And here's a simple Makefile to get us started:

run: hello
	./hello

hello: peru
	gcc -o hello c.c

peru:
	peru sync

Because the peru target doesn't produce a file called peru, make will run it every time. That's both good and bad. It's good because if you ever use the peru override command, make isn't going to have any idea when your overrides have changed, so running peru sync on every build is the only way to get overrides right. But it's bad because now make is going to run the hello target every time too, even if the C file hasn't changed. It's not such a big deal for just one C file, but if we were building a project that took a long time, it would be annoying. Here's one way to fix that problem:

run: hello
	./hello

hello: .peru/lastimports
	gcc -o hello c.c

.peru/lastimports: peru.yaml
	peru sync

Here gcc will only run when the imports have changed. We make this work by referring to the lastimports file that peru generates. That file contains the git hash of all the files peru has put on disk, and importantly, peru promises not to touch that file when the hash hasn't changed.

That's what we want for gcc. What about for peru sync? Because we threw in the explicit dependency on peru.yaml, make will kindly rerun the sync for us if we change the YAML file. If you don't use overrides, that might be all you need. But if you do use overrides, you'll need an extra hack:

run: hello
	./hello

hello: .peru/lastimports
	gcc -o hello c.c

.peru/lastimports: phony
	peru sync

phony:

This is similar to the last example, in that gcc only runs when the imported files actually change. But we've added a phony target, which produces no files. Depending on that forces make to run the peru sync rule every time, so overrides will work properly. A peru sync with everything in cache amounts to a single git status, so you shouldn't notice a slowdown unless your dependencies are extremely large.

The Makefile in this directory reproduces the last example, with some comments and a real .PHONY declaration (which keeps make from getting confused if we ever do create a file called "phony" for some reason).