"unparallelizing" a recursive make

[Darin Johnson]

I've been playing around with distcc to see how useful it might be in our
cygwin environment.  but I'm seeing too much parallelism with regards
to recursive sub-makes.  The problem is that the outputs from different
subdirectories get mixed together, which can be confusing when trying
to see what's going on.  Another problem is that if the build may end
after an error in one submake, yet another submake continues to
build in the backround even after returning to the command line.

What I'd like to be able to easily do is have all the makes serialized
while allowing parallelism within each individual subdirectory.  There's
plenty of parallelism to go around even when limiting it this way.
I could go back to the standard for-loop method as one option, or
I could add a "MAKEFLAGS += -j4" inside the makefile rather than on
the command line, but I'm hoping for a cleaner solution if anyone
has suggestions.

Thanks,
Darin Johnson