bug#12860: avoiding ‘check-recursive’

[Stefano Lattarini]

severity 12860 wishlist
tags 12860 wontfix
close 12860

Hi Thien-Thi.

On 11/11/2012 08:24 AM, Thien-Thi Nguyen wrote:
> In GNU Serveez, there are many subdirectories, but only one (test/)
> that supports "make check" (w/ var ‘TESTS’ et al).  Thus, top-level
> invocation of "make check" needlessly recurses, a grating annoyance.
> 
> I'd thought to arrange for top-level "make check" to simply redirect
> into test/ by using ‘check-local’, but that failed.  Please see:
> 
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/serveez.git/commit?id=f504730d3f
> 
> for details and the suboptimal workaround.  Am i missing something?
> 
If you want to avoid recursion, you should use a non-recursive Makefile.
GNU packages like Coreutils, Bison and Automake itself already use such
a setup in their build system, with no problem that I know of.

The current behaviour of the '*-recursive' targets is deeply entrenched
in the Automake implementation and design, and I have no plans to
change it.  I'm thus closing this report as "Won't Fix", sorry.

Best Regards,
  Stefano