History
Historically, developers used build automation to call compilers and linkers from inside a build script versus attempting to make the compiler calls from the command line. It is simple to use the command line to pass a single source module to a compiler and then to a linker to create the final deployable object. However, when attempting to compile and link many source code modules, in a particular order, using the command line process is not a reasonable solution. The make scripting language offered a better alternative. It allowed a build script to be written to call in a series, the needed compile and link steps to build a software application. GNU Make also offered additional features such as "makedepend" which allowed some source code dependency management as well as incremental build processing. This was the beginning of Build Automation. Its primary focus was on automating the calls to the compilers and linkers. As the build process grew more complex, developers began adding pre and post actions around the calls to the compilers such as a check-out from version control to the copying of deployable objects to a test location. The term "build automation" now includes managing the pre and post compile and link activities as well as the compile and link activities.
Read more about this topic: Build Automation
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