Reading the makefile

When started, tclmake by default looks for a "tclmakefile" named makefile.tmk or Makefile.tmk. The tclmakefile can be specified on the command line by the -f or --file option.

If there is no such file, tclmake attempts several things. First, it looks for a file named makefile or Makefile. If it finds one, then it reads it (and any files it includes), looking for a variable named TCLMAKEFILE. If it finds one, it uses its value as the name of the tclmakefile, and gives that file an implicit use of the makefile in the current directory (see below).

If neither of the above finds a file, tclmake looks for the environment variable MAKELIB. If it exists, then it looks for the file default.tmk in the directory given by that variable; otherwise, it looks for the file $(TCLMAKE_LIBRARY)/mk/default.tmk (which must exist). This last file contains a number of useful rules for processing directories containing Tcl files, and enables operations like cleaning directories and generating tclIndex files without needing to bother with writing a makefile or tclmakefile.

Once tclmake has a file, it reads it, looking for variable definitions and rules. It also recognizes the following special directives, if they are the first word on a line (that is not part of a command):

include filename

Substitute the named file into the input stream.

use filename

This is like include, except that only variable definitions are extracted from the file. This is useful for having tclmake use information such as the list of files in the directory from a regular makefile, and saves having to maintain two copies.

source filename

Source the named file ino the Tcl interpreter. The file must be a Tcl file. This allows arbitrarily complex commands to be executed.

proc args body

Define a Tcl procedure. This must be a legal Tcl procedure definition. Arbitrary Tcl procedures can be embedded in the tclmakefile. Note that tclmake does not recognize arbitrary Tcl commands in the tclmakefile. For example, you cannot use commands like:

set onething anotherthing