Re: [PATCH 08/11] build: manually update bootstrap from gnulib, and adapt

[Jim Meyering]

Akim Demaille wrote:
> Le 18 janv. 2012 à 22:10, Jim Meyering a écrit :
>
>> [Side note, I liked how bison uses automake's subdir-objects feature
>> (i.e., added efficiency of no recursive make invocations) enough that
>> I've converted cppi to work the same way. ]
>
> Actually that's not the only benefit: another very significant
> one is the correctness of the dependencies across directories

Yes, that is a big plus.

> (e.g., the doc/ man page depend on having the src/ binary ready to
> run --help, which requires its lib/ library etc.).  Which
> in turn provides more effective -j JOBS, since the less directories
> you have, the less serialization you have. In the project I work
> on at Gostai it makes a huge difference.
>
> There's a cost though: the Makefile generated by Automake no
> longer uses pattern-rules, but many replicated rules for each
> target.  And then you can feel Make having a hard time loading
> the file :(  I would really love an AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS = GNU-Make
> that would use %-pattern rules and drop all this useless (for
> me) overhead.

Stefano Lattarini is planning to provide an automake branch that assumes
GNU make.  Maybe we can help accelerate development/adoption.