[MPlayer-dev-eng] recursive make considered harmful

[Diego Biurrun]

On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 10:30:19AM +0200, Luca Barbato wrote:
> 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 ^^

It can be remapped manually of course, but that is really Make's job...
You should not have to worry about the dependency graph, the tool should
do the job for you.  Generating the dependency graph and acting
according to it is what Make was designed to do.  If you cut the graph
apart and try to stitch it back together manually, that is an
error-prone and maintenance-intensive process.

Diego