Re: GSoC project idea: non-recursive automake project

[John Calcote]

On 03/19/2011 01:45 PM, Harlan Stenn wrote:
> Pippijn wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 05:26:58PM -0700, Harlan Stenn wrote:
>>> If there was a student interested in showing how "easy" it was to use
>>> automake to do non-recursive Makefiles for a project, I'd be willing to
>>> co-mentor and work with them to convert NTP to that sort of operation.
>> It's mostly trivial. How hard are GSoC projects supposed to be?
> I'll assume you have seen my reply to Ralf.
>
> From my POV, I have heard folks saying for a long time how "easy" it is
> to use automake to produce non-recursive Makefiles.  But I haven't seen
> this in practice, and on the (few) attempts I have made to figure it out
> myself and look for examples, I have not yet been able to find a really
> useful solution.
>
> What I think we'd want is a reasonably well-documented description of
> how to use automake to produce a source tree where one can:
>
> - run "make" from the top-level of the tree and all of the normal things
>   happen (and all of the normal targets work)
> - run "make" from a subdir, which would handle all of the normal targets
>   for that subdir, and would also automatically handle *all* of the
>   dependencies needed for the specified targets in that subdir (like
>   prerequisite libraries).

I'd be *very* interested to see how this second item is done. One of the
inherent benefits of recursive make is that there's a self-contained
Makefile in each directory. Thus, you can run make from that directory.
I'm wondering how you do that with only one top-level Makefile.

--john