Re: Recursive make harmful

[Richard Boulton]

On Thu, May 31, 2001 at 02:29:37PM -0400, Eric Siegerman wrote:
> Wouldn't one lose the ability to remake just a single module, as
> opposed to the entire project?

No: one could easily put (very small) stub makefiles in each directory,
which simply call the top-level makefile to build just the targets for that
directory.

You would lose the ability to build only sources in a directory and its
subdirs while ignoring files they depended upon elsewhere in the tree which
are out of date, but I'd consider that a feature rather than a problem.
You shouldn't be wanting to build against out-of-date files.

> So what *is* harmful about recursive makes (besides the admitted
> performance penalty)?

Read "Recursive make considered harmful"
http://www.pcug.org.au/~millerp/rmch/recu-make-cons-harm.html

-- 
Richard