Re: recursive make [Was: Help-make Digest, Vol 77, Issue 5]

[Michael R. Head]

On Sat, 2009-04-11 at 12:27 -0700, Philip Guenther wrote:
> Since you don't describe the goal of that rule and it doesn't work as
> is, I'm neither sure how to correct it nor what gain you think it
> would provide.  It looks like you're trying to filter out SUBDIRS
> entries that don't actually have files in them, but why would you have
> added those to SUBDIRS to begin with?

You're right. I was unclear. 

The idea is to declare that a given subdirectory is dependent on just
the files contained within it. Thus, the recursive make call should only
be rebuilt when those dependencies are newer than the directory. I'm
probably missing something glaringly obvious, though... 

> (If you're really concerned about the overhead or extra output
> generated by recursive make, then why not try the non-recursive
> approach?)

Indeed, that's probably the best thing to do for most projects. 

But the way I have my modules structured, I want the subdirectories to
be independent of a top level make (top level projects contain papers,
subdirectories contain test results, diagrams, and bibliographies). Each
subdirectory is shared (in CVS as an '&' module in the CVSROOT/modules
file) across multiple top level directories.

> Philip Guenther

-- 
Michael R. Head <address@hidden>
http://www.suppressingfire.org/~burner/
http://suppressingfire.livejournal.com