Basic functionality

A set of variable definitions and rules are included in every makefile to insure that a reader can rely on standard rules in any makefiles. Besides these inclusion statements, the makefile contains a list of the name-stems of all result files and a rule to create each result file.

The included standard definitions comprise three basic reader commands:

• make burn removes all result files mentioned in the local makefile's result list.
• make build recomputes all result files by exercising the local rules about how each result file is built.
• make clean removes all secondary files. The included standard makefiles contain the rule jclean, which identifies secondary files according to certain suffix naming conventions. Because of the crucial role of cleaning and the potential damage if an insufficient clean rule is supplied, every makefile author has to supply his own clean rule, which he can easily default to jclean.

These three commands define the interface a reader can expect to work for any electronic document. A reader can exercise these three basic tasks without knowing any details about the particular computations described in the local application makefile.