[MPlayer-dev-eng] recursive make considered harmful

[Diego Biurrun]

On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 04:43:00AM +0200, Luca Barbato wrote:
> Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > It is bad.  Why would you want to run make recursively in the first
> > place?
> 
> Usually since you partition your problem better and usually because you 
> just depend on getting the subdir built in order to build what is in the 
> parent dir. Having .mk or .inc doing the same makes this issue 
> pointless, beside the fact is nice doing "cd foodir ; make".

Just add one cross-dependency and you haven't partitioned your problem
better, but broken your graph into non-equivalent pieces instead.

> >> 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.
> > 
> > It is not quite as well-known as it should be, yes.  However, this
> > excuses nothing.  People have simply gotten accustomed to running make
> > clean or distclean all the time because they have come to distrust all
> > the broken make systems.  It's a real shame.
> 
> Most of the people are accustomed to autotools that got that right 

I have seen so many broken auto* build systems...

Diego