Using GNU Make to build both debug and release targets at the same time

Question

I\'m working on a medium sized project which contains several libraries with interdependence\'s which I\'ve recently converted over to build using a non-recursive makefile. My

Answer 1

One of the most persistent problems with Make is its inability to handle more than one wildcard at a time. There is no really clean way to do what you ask (without resorting to recursion, which I don't think is really so bad). Here is a reasonable approach:

CXXFLAGS=-Wall -Wextra -Werror -DLINUX
CXX_DEBUG_FLAGS=-g3 -DDEBUG_ALL 
CXX_RELEASE_FLAGS=-O3 

.PHONY: debug  
debug: CXXFLAGS+=$(CXX_DEBUG_FLAGS)  
debug: HelloWorldD

.PHONY: release  
release: CXXFLAGS+=$(CXX_RELEASE_FLAGS)
release: HelloWorld

DEBUG_OBJECTS = $(addprefix $(PROJECT_ROOT_DIR)/debug_obj/,$(SOURCES:.cpp=.o))
RELEASE_OBJECTS = $(addprefix $(PROJECT_ROOT_DIR)/release_obj/,$(SOURCES:.cpp=.o))

HelloWorldD: $(DEBUG_OBJECTS)
HelloWorld: $(RELEASE_OBJECTS)

# And let's add three lines just to ensure that the flags will be correct in case
# someone tries to make an object without going through "debug" or "release":

CXX_BASE_FLAGS=-Wall -Wextra -Werror -DLINUX
$(DEBUG_OBJECTS): CXXFLAGS=$(CXX_BASE_FLAGS) $(CXX_DEBUG_FLAGS)
$(RELEASE_OBJECTS): CXXFLAGS=$(CXX_BASE_FLAGS) $(CXX_RELEASE_FLAGS)