maintainer mode

[Alexandre Oliva]

[ context for subscribers of automake at gnu.org: Samba developers (yes,
I'm here too :-) have been discussing whether to adopt automake or
not.  The main argument against it is that there is a reduced number
of source files, all compiled with the same commands, so there's no
reason to use a tool that would require us to create Makefiles in
every single directory ]

On Oct 30, 1998, David Collier-Brown <davecb at Canada.Sun.COM> wrote:

> Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

>> is there anything wrong with that?  i would like to see this happen, as i
>> could split rpc_* into libraries and just do cp into pam_ntdom etc...

> 	It works, but it doesn't scale.

And even that is debatable.  As I see it, maintaining everything in a
single makefile doesn't scale.  Just after reading a paper about
keeping everything in a single makefile (and I fail to remember whose
paper it was :-(, I started wondering whether automake could be
adapted so as to build makefiles with complete dependencies, including
data from subdirectories.  The fact is that it *can* do that, but, in
general, it can't issue compilation commands in a portable way,
because `-c -o' is not portable, and also due to possible subtleties
in user-defined rules.

Anyway, it could still benefit from including the complete dependency
list in higher-level Makefiles, and creating rules that start
sub-makes to build targets found to be out-of-date.  Tom, what do you
think, is this doable?  Would it be worth the effort?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva
mailto:oliva at dcc.unicamp.br mailto:oliva at gnu.org mailto:aoliva at acm.org
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, SP, Brasil