What it mostly means is that you have to tell make what files to worry about (the declaring bit) and either give it rule about how to process them (more declaring) or rely on the default rules.
Yet again at least 6 people skimmed the first paragraph and voted to close as duplicate before reading the actual question.
I rephrased this into the most trivial, obvious manner to make it absolutely 100% clear this is completely different, and yet only one of them retracted the close-vote and ...
@dmckee When the hardest part of writing this thing is figuring out the makefile it becomes clear that I've been eating crap for the last 2 years and not learning what I should
@BernardMeurer Few people are really expert at make. Most users get a good-enough template together and just tweak it until they hit the point where it simple won't work.
Then they either learn a bit more and write a better template, or try to convince everyone else on the project to switch to something newer.
And the next line is the first target in the file, so it is the one that runs by default. The first target should be the only one (other than clean and install) your users ever need.
So they can make clean; make; make install with a moderate confidence that it might just work.
@BernardMeurer If I could be sure that the chat room contained only immature males the temptation to rapidly lower the tone would be almost irresistable.
I also suspect that Danu may have a new important other in his life. Such things often result in the acquisition of otherwise unheard-of cultural foods.
@knzhou Can I ask why you flag things as "harmfully incorrect and don't downvote them?
The first and foremost tool for marking stuff as not helpful or even harmful is the down-arrow button. It sends a signal to every reader that comes after and doesn't require the moderate to be present to have that effect.
