Re: [Freeipmi-devel] The buildsytem problem

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

Il giorno mer, 07/09/2011 alle 14.04 -0700, Albert Chu ha scritto:
> There is still the tiny part of me that thinks, "It's not broke, no need
> to change."  When I'm developing the code, it's still nice to be able to
> type 'make' in the subdir I'm in, instead of typing make at the
> top-level directory.  But at the same time, I realize that I should
> probably give up that comfort for the sake of the distro maintainers out
> there.

I used to have similar feelings but then I considered two things:

 - even on my system while developing, non-recursive make means I can
change as many files as I want and it will only rebuild the targets that
use those, rather than scanning the whole tree to rebuild a
subdirectory;
 - using out-of-source builds make it tremendously nice to test
different configurations without keeping around two or more checkouts of
the whole sources to keep in sync.. I usually do this to test different
compiler, feature levels or flags.

At the end it's your choice and I won't try to get it done my way if you
don't feel like changing your workflow... on the other hand I suggest
you to give it a shot, it would reduce the time-to-build for you as well
as us especially when changing libraries and tools at once.

> So the recursion would be 1 level deep?  I sort of fear having some
> monster makefile in the top-level directory that includes almost
> everything in FreeIPMI.

It certainly would soften the blow.. as for a monster makefile. it is
well possible to use includes to have the top-level Makefile call some
Makemodule.am file that actually declares that subdirectory's targes,
which would probably be preferred, considering the structure of
freeipmi.

HTH,
-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/