On Thu, 2002-08-15 at 10:59, Zdenek Kabelac wrote: > I've proposed several times few things which would certainly > drasticaly improve the speed - though they are for different > parts of auto* tools project - there were some reactions - but > so far non of them were realized and there is not visible any > progress here (and as I've said before the whole auto* stuff is getting > constanly slower and more space consuming - not mentining the > problems with backward compatibility).
Feel free to propose your ideas again. While the complexity has been increasing over time, I'd like to point out that some cases have been massively improved: for example, the Gstreamer makefile.am used to take hours (literally) to be processed - this has been fixed in more recent Automakes. However, it would be nice to improve Automake's complexity in more general cases. One approach to reducing the complexity of the generated makefiles is to move to a non-recursive style of Makefile. This is supported to an extent by more recent automakes (1.6+ certainly, I think 1.5 as well). This involves having a single Makefile.am at the top of your project which contains all the dependencies and targets for the whole project. For maintainance purposes, you can split the Makefile.am by using the automake "include " command to include fragments from other directories. Unfortunately, it's not terribly neat at present, since this requires full paths (from the top directory) to source files to be supplied. With a bit of effort you can make a reasonable system, though. -- Richard
