Re: Recursive make harmful

[Alexandre Duret-Lutz]

>>> "Tom" == Tom Tromey <address@hidden> writes:

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 upon elsewhere in the tree which are out of date, but I'd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 be wanting to build against out-of-date files.

 Tom> ... and with automake this only helps with things like linking against
 Tom> a library anyway, since automake does full dependency tracking for
 Tom> compilations.

No, not only libraries.  Dependency tracking with recursive make
will not lead to the update of any target which is in a separate
directory.  For instance I have source files which depend on
generated headers in another directory; it usually happens that
I'm building the sources with out-of-date headers by error. 
(yeah, sounds like a reason to try Automake with a single
toplevel Makefile.am).

[...]
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Alexandre Duret-Lutz