On Wed, 2006-05-24 at 17:01 +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote: > * Ralf Corsepius wrote on Wed, May 24, 2006 at 04:34:02PM CEST:
> It often helps a lot to have fewer Makefiles than one per directory, > especially in parts of a source tree where they are rather simple. > > > - subdir makefile.am-fragments are tedious to maintain in longer terms. > > In practice, in nontrivial projects, at least I found myself ending up > > with a mixture of real flat Makefiles (no subdir *.ams) and independent > > subdirs. > > But wouldn't they be easier to maintain if there were an "import" > feature? Well, may-be partially. Q: What would such an import feature be aiming at? AFAIU, its primary purposes would be a) to make subdir-makefile.am fragments relocatible b) to add proper variable initializations (XXX= vs. XXX +=) to the flat toplevel Makefile. a) would not be much effort as far as automake primaries are concerned. b) is easy to achieve for maintainers by applying a couple of conventions (E.g. in fragments, use += only, automake will complain if an initialization is missing). Real problems wrt. relocation would occur with * the "production-side" of make-rules. I don't know how you'd want to make a make-production using an arbitrary scripting language "relocatible". * PHONY targets. Consider two subdir Makefile.am using the same PHONY targets for different purposes. An aspect, I don't see how an import feature would help is "scoping": A subdir-Makefile.am controls one subdir, a flat toplevel Makefile controls all subdirs. I.e. when developing on a package, with a non-flat Makefile structure, e.g. a "make clean" inside of a subdir cleans this single subdir. With a flat Makefile the whole source tree will be "cleaned". In many cases, this renders flat Makefiles impractical. Yet another aspect is size/speed of files generated from flat-Makefile.am. Processing all-flat Makefile.am of a source tree containing 100s of source-files can be annoyingly slow and easily reach the order of several minutes, even on contemporary HW. I don't see how an "import feature" would help. Ralf
