[MPlayer-dev-eng] .developer cruft

[Diego Biurrun]

On Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 03:16:26AM -0500, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 09:30:09AM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > 
> > While we're at it, why is .libdeps needed at all?
> 
> It's just a set of rules to make the main makefile recurse into
> subdirectories if any files in the subdirs have changed.
> Unconditionally recursing into them is also possible but would make
> performance extremely bad in the common case where nothing has
> changed.

I say go for unconditional recursing.  It takes 1s on my machine when
nothing has changed, I see no need to improve this "extremely bad
performance".  Another downside of .libdeps is that it needs to be
updated every time things get added, shuffled around etc in the source
tree.  So far this has always been overlooked, just look at the cvs log
of etc/.libdeps.  And it's documented nowhere, few devs understand it
and/or use it.  IMO it is an obscure mechanism with questionable
benefit.  You'll need some pretty good arguments to sway my opinion.

> Of course I'd be happiest if we could eliminate recursive make
> altogether...
> http://www.pcug.org.au/~millerp/rmch/recu-make-cons-harm.html

I've read that paper as well, but while the rant is completely right in
theory, the practical instructions for implementing non-recursive make
are missing from it.  Where are the examples of non-recursive make
usage?  The whole world seems to happily use it recursively...

Diego