Re: Recursive make harmful

[Richard Boulton]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2001 at 11:16:45AM +0200, Alexandre Duret-Lutz wrote:
> There is something nice about having one Makefile.am in each
> subdirectory, it's that it helps to make selfcontained and
> reusable modules.

What is being advocated is that we keep having Makefile.am's in each
separate directory (there's no question that this is desirable for
maintainability), but that automake combines them all together into a
top-level Makefile.in, rather than building Makefile.in's in each
directory.

> But that's really painful.  Does s.o. has another idea?  (I'm
> thinking that maybe automake could figure `bar/foo' from the
> include path, and do something helpful with that...).

With separate Makefile.am's in each directory, automake should be able to
figure the bar/foo out from the directory paths.  The user shouldn't have
to worry about what the path to the top-level is.

-- 
Richard