Re: link: "Recursive Make Considered Harmful"

[Bob Bishop <rb@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

At 22:54 08/01/2005, George Georgalis wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 02:31:22AM -0800, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> >    I can't even get firefox to get past 30 seconds worth of the build
> >    before it goes into a stupid configure script loop.
>
> I've been mulling over the pdf file linked here
> http://www.pcug.org.au/~millerp/rmch/recu-make-cons-harm.html
> Recursive Make Considered Harmful, Peter Miller
>
> // George
>
>
> --
> George Georgalis, systems architect, administrator Linux BSD IXOYE
> http://galis.org/george/ cell:646-331-2027 mailto:george@xxxxxxxxx

Apologies for late arrival in this discussion.

This whole problem area (fundamentally: "Make Doesn't Scale") was 
well-understood 20 years ago. See for instance: D. M. Tilbrook, P. R. H. 
Place: Tools for the Maintenance and Installation of a large Software 
Distribution. USENIX Summer 1986: 223-237. The approach presented therein 
is robust enough to be still in use today.



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