Re: inheriting makefiles

[Mike Maxwell]

Johan Bezem wrote:
<snip>
Thanks for the ideas--I eventually decided on the following construct, which
appears at the beginning of each of my makefiles (except the topmost one,
where the recursion stops):

    #Get defns from parent makefile:
    ifdef THIS_DIR
       THIS_DIR:=$(THIS_DIR)/..
    else
       THIS_DIR:=$(CURDIR)
    endif
    include $(THIS_DIR)/../makefile

I also include the ff. at the very beginning of a file, as in many .h files:

    ifndef FOO_MAKEFILE
    FOO_MAKEFILE = Languages/Spanish/Foo/makefile

    (plus an 'endif' at the end of file)

--where the var name is of course different for each makefile.  The value to
which this var is set is unimportant, although I use the directory
structure.  (But nothing will break if I change my directory structure,
because I don't rely on the value of the var, only the fact that the var has
a value.)

It seems to me unfortunate that all this has to be manually coded; it would
seem like an inheritance hierarchy would (should) be a natural way to
organize makefiles, and perhaps a direction for future enhancement.  It
would presumably require some notion of 'self', where self = the path +
filename of each makefile.
--
     Mike Maxwell
     Linguistic Data Consortium
     maxwell@ldc.upenn.edu