imake is a build automation system written for the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...

. It was used by X from X11R1 (1987) to X11R6.9 (2005), and continued to be used in

XFree86 XFree86 is an implementation of the X Window System. It was originally written for Unix-like operating systems on IBM PC compatibles and was available for many other operating systems and platforms. It is free and open source software under the X ...

(last commit 2009). It is implemented on top of the

C preprocessor The C preprocessor is the macro preprocessor for the C, Objective-C and C++ computer programming languages. The preprocessor provides the ability for the inclusion of header files, macro expansions, conditional compilation, and line control ...

and

make Make or MAKE may refer to: * Make (magazine), a tech DIY periodical *Make (software), a software build tool *Make, Botswana, in the Kalahari Desert *Make Architects Make Architects is an international architecture practice headquartered in Londo ...

. The first version was written by Todd Brunhoff at

Tektronix Tektronix, Inc., historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. Originally an independent ...

. imake generates makefiles from a template, a set of

macro functions, and a per-directory input file called an Imakefile. This allows machine dependencies (such as

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

options, alternate command names, and special make rules) to be kept separate from the descriptions of the various items to be built. imake was heavily used for X and X-related software through the 1990s, and for unrelated software such as

ChorusOS ChorusOS is a microkernel real-time operating system designed as a message passing computing model. ChorusOS began as the Chorus distributed real-time operating system research project at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science an ...

. It was also used for

configuration management Configuration management (CM) is a process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. The CM proc ...

. With the release of X.org X11R7.0, it was replaced by

GNU Autotools The GNU Autotools, also known as the GNU Build System, is a suite of programming tools designed to assist in making source code packages portable to many Unix-like systems. It can be difficult to make a software program portable: the C compiler ...

. (X11R6.9 and X11R7.0 were the same codebase with a different build system.). X.Org plans to use

Meson In particle physics, a meson ( or ) is a type of hadronic subatomic particle composed of an equal number of quarks and antiquarks, usually one of each, bound together by the strong interaction. Because mesons are composed of quark subparticles ...

in the future instead of Autotools.

Notes

Sources

External links

Software Portability with imake

Build automation X Window System {{Comp-sci-stub