Re: suddenly, "recursive make considered harmful" makes piles of sense

[Noel Yap]

IME, it's best to have a GNUmakefile in each directory (so anyone can do a 
gmake within any directory) and a, say, GNUprivate.mk file within each 
directory (that contains the non-common stuff).

I've seen two philosophies on this:
1. gmake within any directory will build the entire project
2. gmake within any directory will build that directory and any subdirectories 
(a la recursive make)

I personally lean towards the second philosophy which means that each GNUmakefile needs to include its corresponding GNUprivate.mk and its subdirectories' GNUprivate.mk's.  To minimize maintenance on GNUmakefile, a function is used that'll just shell out 
and execute a "find . -name GNUprivate.mk".

HTH,
Noel

Robert P. J. Day wrote:

> On Sat, 15 Jan 2005, Alessandro Vesely wrote:
>
>
> > "Robert P. J. Day" wrote:
> >
> > > [...]
> > > and it was just yesterday that it suddenly dawned on me how to make
> > > this much simpler, and only after i started redesigning the structure
> > > did it occur to me that this might be what miller's paper might be
> > > talking about.
> >
> > It is not. Peter Miller's emphasis is about make being able to
> > traverse the whole dependency tree the way it reckons, rather that
> > traversing it a sub-tree at a time in the order dictated by the
> > top-level makefile without ever being able to see the whole tree at
> > once. E.g. using `include' rather than `$(MAKE)'.
>
>
> yes, i see what you mean.  i hadn't actually finished the paper, but i
> thought i could see what he was getting at.
>
> still, i think philosophically there's some common ground -- i'm
> seeing a definite advantage in taking control of the lower-level parts
> of the build process and pulling them back to the top of the tree so i
> can control the entire process all at the top level (even to the
> extent, as i described in my next posting, of controlling build
> options of lower levels at the very top).
>
> i'll think on this some more.  thanks for the feedback.
>
> rday
>
>
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