[MPlayer-dev-eng] recursive make considered harmful

[Luca Barbato]

Diego Biurrun wrote:
> 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.

You broke the topology, you may ask yourself if that cross-dep couldn't 
be remapped otherwise. Having recursive makefiles requires you to keep 
the paths following the deps topology ^^

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

I also see many broken plain makefiles, nonetheless the tools aren't 
that bad if used correctly.

Still I think having the non recursive makefile could be an improvement.

lu

-- 

Luca Barbato
Gentoo Council Member
Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC
http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero