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I’m a Java developer learning C++. I’m using eclipse as my IDE and MinGW as my toolset. Is it considered a best practice to list down every single object in a makefile? Also, is it just as acceptable to use wildcards to include all the files?
The use of wildcards is common, and accepted, but not really good practice.
If extra source files get into your source directories, they could wind up causing conflicts or — worse — riding silently in your libraries as useless baggage (introns?). Also, if a needed source file goes missing, your linker will complain about a missing {function|typename|whatever} and it might not be obvious what file has been lost (not really a problem if you have good source control, but still annoying). Finally, if your build system is expected to produce different targets using different subsets of the source files, wildcards will require you to either divide your source directories Venn-diagram-style, or resort to filename conventions that do the same thing (gah!).
Maintaining explicit lists of object files in a makefile really isn’t that hard to do, and it keeps things simple.