recursive make considered harmful?

[Karl Berry]

Tom Tromey mentioned a paper to me titled "recursive make considered harmful".
It is by Peter Miller, circa 1997.  
http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf

It describes a method of constructing project Makefiles (using includes)
so there is only one top-level Makefile, and the numerous benefits one
gets by doing so, compared to the traditional recursive make method.  It
assumes GNU make and makes plentiful use of its features.

At the least, I think it would be helpful for the GNU make manual to
reference this paper, and at the most, perhaps some of its ideas could
be incorporated into the manual.

(Unfortunately, for automake/autoconf projects, I'm not sure there's an
obvious way to apply these methods, because recursive make is built so
deeply into those tools.)

Just a suggestion ...

karl