Re: automake -vs- huge projects

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On 16 Dec 2003, Tom Tromey wrote:
>
> The problem is, automake generates an explicit rule for each
> compilation.  Our resulting Makefile.in is nearly 9 megabytes.  This
> is really much too large -- compare to 200K with automake 1.4.

I have observed the same problem myself.  It is not language
dependent.  At some point (perhaps when subdirectory builds were
introduced) Automake diverged from using common rules, and started to
insert per-target rules. It seems that a bit more smarts can be used
to get close to automake 1.4 efficiency.  Per-subdirectory rules and
definitions can be added in order to significantly reduce the amount
of redundant code, and to re-enable the capability to usefully
override parts of the default Makefile.in.

> One idea we had for a fix is to introduce a new "gnu-make" option that
> would allow automake to generate code relying on GNU make.  Then we
> could replace all those rules with a single "%.o: %.java".

This doesn't seem to be necessary.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
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http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen