<tdstyle="width: 20%"align="right"valign="top">Updating This Document</td>
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<h1id="Make_Targets">Make Targets</h1>
<p>A Makefile has a set of targets that can be built. Typically, every Makefile has an
<b>all</b> target which builds all targets, but there may be optional targets as well. A CDT Makefile project enables one to invoke the various make targets via the Make Targets dialog. Since an Autotools project is a form of Makefile project, it too supports the Make Targets dialog.
Make Targets are important for an Autotool project because there are a large number of make targets added to the Makefile automatically by configuration. Typically, a project is built by running
<b>make all</b>, but it is installed by invoking
<b>make install</b>. The install target places files in standard locations; usually system directories on a Linux system. For example, header files would be installed in /usr/include and made available to all users of the system. The install prefix (/usr) can be overridden using the configure --prefix parameter or else by specifying prefix=xxxx on the call to make (e.g. make install prefix=/my/local/directory) so that testing can be performed without modifying the whole system.
</p>
<p>A regular CDT Makefile project requires users to add their own Make Targets, however, the Autotools plug-in analyzes the top-level Makefile for you and creates top-level Make Targets for the project. As mentioned, these automatically added targets can be numerous. If you wish to create targets to run in sub-directories of the main build directory, you must add these manually. For example, you might wish to build docs in a lower-level sub-directory, but not for the entire project.</p>
<p>The Make Targets dialog can be displayed in two ways:</p>
<ol>
<li>Selecting a file or folder in a project and clicking on the Project -> Make Target menu item</li>
<li>Right clicking on a file or folder in a project and selecting Make Target</li>
</ol>
<p>This brings up a sub-menu containing Create... and Build.... to either create a new Make Target or build an existing Make Target, respectively.</p>
<p>There is nothing different in the Make Target dialog for Autotools, however, a few concepts need to be clarified.</p>
<p>For Make Targets added as part of the Project -> Make Target menu item, the target is for the top-level Makefile for the current build. This means that if you add a Make Target this way, it will persist across configurations and will try and run the
<b>make</b> command in the top-level build location specified for the active configuration.
</p>
<p>Make Targets added by using the right-click Make Target menu are location sensitive. This means that the
<b>make</b> command will attempt to run in that directory where the right-click was performed, regardless of whether there is a Makefile present there. Let's say you want to add your own Make Target that performed a
<b>make all install</b> (i.e. you want to group multiple targets together into one). If you are in configuration X with build directory build-X, you want to right-click in a directory that is build-X or a sub-directory of build-X. This target will issue a
<b>make all install</b> in that particular directory. If you wanted the same target for another configuration, you would have to right-click in its build directory or lower and add another Make Target. Obviously, for top-level Make Targets, using the Project -> Make Target menu item makes the most sense since it applies to all configurations. If you add a Make Target to a source directory, it will likely fail when run because it will try and run
<b>make</b> in that directory which will probably only contain a Makefile.in or Makefile.am file and not a Makefile which is only generated at configure time.
</p>
<p>The Make Target dialog can be used to override various flags within the Makefile. For example, to perform a
<b>make install</b> and reset the prefix to /my/local/directory, you would first select the
<p>The check-box that says "Run all project builders" should be left un-checked. By default, we only want the CDT Makefile builder to run and not the Autotools configure builder or any other builder.</p><hr/>
