A.2 Anatomy of a GSRC Makefile

GSRC Makefiles are the point of entry for the user into the GSRC system. Since GSRC supplies GNU software and there are GNU coding standards that dictate how package installation is supposed to work, the GSRC Makefiles for most GNU software packages are similar.

In order to facilitate working with the GSRC Makefiles in an automated way, such as searching them via a script, they all share a common structure, split into three sections: metadata variables, build variables, and the build recipes. By convention, these three sections are separated by lines of seventy hash symbols (“#”). This helps to visually separate the sections, as well as to provide convenient stopping points when scanning or searching the files.