How I stopped worrying and loved Makefiles
Those times belong to the past now and nowadays not many programmers use GNU Make1. Try asking this question and you will see disgust at best.
Let build a base line. make orchestrates tasks based on dependencies, executing commands to generate target files and keep them up to date efficiently. It streamlines software compilation and project management.
The second non obvious use of make I stood, was the way to refresh Postfix’s map files. With Postfix servers, you’ve been usually writing a bunch of text files like aliases, transports, etc, which have to be indexed to the binary Berkley DB format.
The more complicated the Postfix configuration, the more files you had. If you missed to update one of map files, your configuration wasn’t effective and you could spend hours debugging: why this f… alias do not work?
.PHONY: reload: This line declares the target reload as a phony target 3. Phony targets are ones that do not represent actual files. This is typically used for targets that don’t produce output files, such as clean, all, etc. It ensures that even if a file named reload exists in the directory, the reload target will still be executed.
