Re: [PATCH 00/22] Towards a non-recursive build system for coreutils?

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 08/31/2012 08:42 PM, Jim Meyering wrote:
> Stefano Lattarini wrote:
>> On 08/31/2012 08:28 PM, Bob Proulx wrote:
>>> Jim Meyering wrote:
>>>> As expected, the build now seems faster.
>>>> I haven't yet measured it.
>>>
>>> Not wanting to ask work of you but it would be great if when all was
>>> said and done there was a posting of the build time that changed due
>>> to the build infrastructure change from recursive to non-recursive
>>> make.  It would be an interesting datapoint.
>>>
>> FWIW, I'm helping with this conversion because I believe non-recursive
>> builds offer improved clarity, correctness and reliability.  The fact
>> that they might also end up offering enhanced performance is just an
>> extra (albeit valuable) perk, not a motivating factor.
> 
> Of course, one of us will time it once it's all done.
> We'll also need a NEWS entry, and I hope Stefano will write it.
> 
> For reference, I look very favorably on converting all
> packages to non-recursive make.  Bison was the first GNU
> project that I noticed doing this.  I liked what I saw there
> so much that I converted cppi's build system as a proof-of-concept.
> 
> It's a lot smaller and simpler, so you can see better what's required
> there.  In spite of that, I'm sure it can be cleaned up even more.
>
An important (and big) step would be to enhance gnulib to create
Makefile fragments that can be used in non-recursive packages.

I see tha, as of today, bison and cppi works around the gnulib
limitation by *heavily* massaging its generated Makefile.am.
Which is quite brittle and not at all scalable (albeit it certainly
was the easiest and quickest way to implement the de-recursion of
those package; and I must admit that, being in Akim's or Jim's
place, I'd have done the same).

Regards,
  Stefano