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Re: Non-recursive makefiles


From: Ralf Corsepius
Subject: Re: Non-recursive makefiles
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 16:34:02 +0200

On Wed, 2006-05-24 at 13:57 +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Hi Olly,
> 
> * Olly Betts wrote on Wed, May 24, 2006 at 12:24:53PM CEST:
> > I've been looking at the feasibility of converting a project (Xapian)
> > using autoconf+automake+libtool to using non-recursive makefiles.  
> 
> > I'm fairly convinced it'll be an improvement overall, but there are a
> > few issues I've noticed so far:
> > 
> > * Generally, it would be useful for the manual to go into a bit more
> >   detail about how to approach all this.
> 
> Agreed.  I'm sure Alexandre will gladly accept contributions to
> improvement to the manual.  :-)
I don't think it's worth it, because I think this concept is
a) Trivial to implement
b) IMNSHO, the approach has had way too much attention, because
- Non-recursive makefiles are suitable for projects of mediocre
complexity. For complex projects the price of flat Makefile is high and
often doesn't pay off.
- subdir makefile.am-fragments are tedious to maintain in longer terms.
In practice, in nontrivial projects, at least I found myself ending up
with a mixture of real flat Makefiles (no subdir *.ams) and independent
subdirs.

> > * I'm not sure what to call the Makefile.am snippets in the
> >   subdirectories.  I looked at GraphicsMagick which was suggested to be
> >   a good example in a previous thread and that calls them "Makefile.am".
> >   That helps editors know how to syntax highlight, but it feels odd to
> >   me and I wonder if it might confuse people to see "Makefile.am"
> >   without "Makefile.in", especially if there's an unrelated static
> >   "Makefile".
> 
> Probably, I've wondered about this before.  You could call it sub.am
> or partial.am or similar.  But I'm bad at naming, so I'd rather have 
> someone suggest something better.  Wrt editor highlighting: it looks
> like Emacs sets type to Makefile for *.am.  For Vim, let's submit a
> patch after we've agreed on a good set of names (it sets *.am to
> file type Applix ELF if not [mM]akefile.am currently).
I'd recommend using files ending with "*.am", but would not use Makefile.am.

Ralf






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