[MPlayer-dev-eng] .developer cruft

[Rich Felker]

On Sun, Apr 02, 2006 at 10:23:00AM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > > > The whole world does a lot of stupid things. :)))))
> > > 
> > > Sure, but when the world just ignores the textbook correct solution it
> > > may also be that the textbook correct solution isn't all that hot.
> > 
> > There's absolutely nothing 'not all that hot' about the correct use of
> > makefiles except that people are too stupid to write them correctly.
> 
> Either that or the cost benefit ratio is not appealing enough to make
> people overcome their inertia.  I have yet to see a real world example
> for recursive make failures.

Unless I'm misunderstanding your words this is completely false.
MPlayer is an abysmal failure at recursive make, and I've seen plenty
of packages that do it "correctly" (with unconditional recursion)
where it takes over a minute to decide that nothing needs to be done.
Mozilla comes to mind as a good example.. :)

> Look at the FFmpeg build system.  Modulo a bit of cruft that still needs
> to be moved into configure I'm rather happy how it's turning out.  It's
> simple, it's understandable, it's (still) recursive, it works(TM).  Of
> course, if you have further suggestions for improvement, I'm all ears.

The only 'cost' of 'monolithic' make arises in cases like this where
you want the individual parts of a project to be able to build
independently of one another, when taken out of the tree. This
requires a bit of thinking (and it's the one difficulty I see in
making the switch in MPlayer), but I think it can be handled with
clever use of includes. I'll see what I can come up with.

> > Heading this fud over and over makes me sick, and hearing it from you
> > is even more disappointing.
> 
> Oh, come on, spare us the drama ;)

It's just that you're usually open to correcting broken things and
don't side with the ignorant establishment.

Rich