[MPlayer-dev-eng] recursive make considered harmful (was: Re: The new Makefiles)

[Bryan Henderson]

I'd like to point out a serious flaw in Miller's paper.  It's somewhat
of a strawman argument, as he describes half a dozen ways to do
recursive make incorrectly and concludes that recursive make is bad.
To do recursive make correctly, you have to invoke make on every
dependency that is in another directory.  Make
either rebuilds the dependency or determines that it doesn't have to
be rebuilt.

So I maintain recursive make is not incorrect per se.

The drawback is a whole lot of makes (not builds, just makes) of the
same thing in a single run.  And it takes extra rules to make this
happen and I've seen plenty of projects that don't have them.

It's worth noting that Miller's paper was fairly well known 10 years
ago, and I believe the use of recursive make has only increased since
then.  So he apparently didn't convince a lot of people.

I'm not arguing in favor of recursive make for Mplayer.  Just offering
a rebuttal to the paper for the record.