Over the years I’ve written a few whitepapers with tips, advanced usage suggestions, and even implementation details for GNU make. These are collected below, in the hopes that they might prove useful, or at least interesting.

In general I haven’t gone back and updated these since they were originally created. It’s quite possible that, in some situations, newer capabilities added to GNU make (or other tools) provide simpler or more powerful alternatives.

• Paul’s Rules of Makefiles
• How Not to Use VPATH
• Advanced Auto-Dependency Generation
• Multi-Architecture Builds
• Jobserver Implementation