Re: project in multiply directories

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Mon, 28 Sep 2009, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > The main advantage of a Makefile per directory is that it makes it
> > easier to request building seperate parts of the tree.
> Right. Exactly this is a huge win in bigger projects.

Not necessarily.  Even with some smaller projects (e.g. libtiff) I 
usually see that the costs incurred by the recursion are greater than 
the build costs.  In large recursive projects, it is common for many 
unnecessary things to be done after editing one source file and typing 
'make', which encourages building in a subdirectory.  In a 
non-recursive build it is still possible to build any individual 
component by specifying 'make path/to/target'.  If the incantation is 
too difficult to remember (or takes too much typing) then just add an 
alias target name for it.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/