cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/6863402

Fed up w/ my ad-hoc scripts to display the targets and variables in a makefile(s), I’ve decided to write a reusable piece of code to do that: https://github.com/bahmanm/bmakelib/issues/81

The first step toward that would be to understand the common commenting styles. So far I have identified 4 patterns in the wild which you can find below.

Are there any style guides/conventions around this topic? Any references to well-written makefiles I can get inspiration from?

A

VAR1 = foo   ## short one-liner comment
my-target:   ## short one-liner comment 
	…

B

# longer comment which 
# may span
# several lines
VAR1 = foo

## comments can be prefixed w/ more than # 
## lorem ipsum dolor
my-target: 
	…

C

#####
# a comment block which is marked w/ several #s on
# an otherwise blank line
#####
VAR1 = foo

D

#####
#>    # heading 1
#     This is a variation to have markdown comments
#     inside makefile comments.
#
#     ## It's a made-up style!  
#     I came up w/ this style and used it to document `bmakelib`.
#     For example: https://is.gd/QtiqyA (opens github)
#<
#####
VAR1 = foo
    • bahmanmOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      That’s a great starting point - and a good read anyways!

      Thanks 🙏

    • bahmanmOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I usually capture all my development-time “automation” in Make and Ansible files. I also use makefiles to provide a consisent set of commands for the CI/CD pipelines to work w/ in case different projects use different build tools. That way CI/CD only needs to know about make build, make test, make package, … instead of Gradle/Maven/… specific commands.

      Most of the times, the makefiles are quite simple and don’t need much comments. However, there are times that’s not the case and hence the need to write a line of comment on particular targets and variables.