To understand the possibilities of deal.II, it's best that we have a look at some of the standard example files that come with the package. You will see the /var/mpishare/deal.II/examples folder in your source directory tree. Go there and enter the directory of the first example called step-1.
As you have seen in the previous chapters, it is a time-consuming action to always specify every single link library when compiling your programs. Also, when you have programs with more than one object file, compiling this way will soon get annoying and unmanageable. However, there is a far better way to generate software, namely using the so-called makefiles.
A makefile is nothing but a file that contains all the compiler and linker information. It is a special file that is processed by a program called make. This program can be understood to be a simple command interpreter that makes software creation more flexible and convenient.
If you open the /var/mpishare/deal.II...
