Re: Large project support

[Timo K Suoranta]

> Wildcards are unreliable, and with automake we try to promote reliable
> builds.  For instance that is why we use full instead of partial
> dependency information.

Wildcards can be unrealiable if you don't spesifically indicate that you
want them, and that you really knbw that your source directories must only
contain files that really belong to that project.

However, manual editing of source file list is not much more reliable I
think.

> As an example suppose you want to use per-executable CFLAGS.  This
> feature won't work with wildcards since we must generate an explicit
> rule for each .o in the executable.

Per-executable CFLAGS can be done by having per-directory CFLAGS. I
already place each executable sources to separate directory.

> With wildcards there is no way to know when we need to regenerate the
> Makefile (we could do it every time, but first that would be horrible
> and people would complain, and second it only works with GNU make
> anyway).

I would be happy with something that I can call manually. I would have to
edit Makefile.am's manually anyaway - I just would like to say something
like autome --update instead. I would happily wait the time running
autotools takes. The wildcard pass is not the significant part of this
rerun. You do not need GNU make to make a list of source files when this
is done as part of automake pass.

My project currently has over 260 files in 20 directories and around 50000
lines of source code. The automake --update feature, or a simple script
which I could run before running automake, would be useful simply to
create the Makefile.am files - I am sure you can imagine that :)


-- Timo Suoranta -- address@hidden --