VizMake

Description

Vizmake visualizes make. It runs a modified GNU make to collect trace data and visualizes some useful information of Makefile. Visualization provides developers great insight of the make process.

Current implementation supports:

• Viewing what commands are actually invoked during build time.
• Visualizing lines in Makefile that reference variables and the actual value of a referenced variable during build time. [Mac OS X and Linux]
• Analyzing and visualizing dependencies in rules to help figure out what dependencies are potentially missed or are potentially extra. [Linux (rely on strace)]

Installation and Usage

Let $(VIZMAKE) be the path of the root directory of vizmake project.

• Go into $(VIZMAKE)/make/ directory to build the modified version of GNU make. The binary file make should be in the $(VIZMAKE)/make directory.
• Run python $(VIZMAKE)/vizmake.py in any project as how you run make. Think of python vizmake.py as a make wrapper. You can pass any make command line arguments to python $(VIZMAKE)/vizmake.py.
• Open web browser to see http://localhost:8000

Screenshots

Run vizmake

This screenshot is in a terminal after running

		python $(VIZMAKE)/vizmake.py all

which is equivalent to

		make all

except for doing visualization:

Index page

This screenshot is in a browser showing all make processes and all command processes (e.g., gcc) spawned from a make process:

Full command line page

This screenshot is in a browser showing the full command line to execute a process after clicking on one CMD link in the index page:

Makefile variable view page

This screenshot is in a browser showing the visualization of Makefile's variable view after clicking on one VAR link in the index page:

This page visualizes the lines in a Makefile that reference some variables. It also visualizes the information of each referenced variable during build time, including the variable value, the source of variable definition, and other variables referenced by a variable.

Makefile dependency view page

This screenshot is in a browser showing the visualization of dependencies in rules view after clicking on one DEP link in the index page:

Demo

http://wenbinf.github.com/vizmake/demo

License

GPLv3