[MPlayer-dev-eng] recursive make considered harmful
Diego Biurrun
diego at biurrun.de
Thu Jun 5 09:39:35 CEST 2008
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
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