Stefano Lattarini wrote: > 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).
Precisely. For the first project (bison), or the second, a small proof-of-concept (cppi), it would have been hard to justify diving into gnulib-tool's lib/Makefile.am generation code. Now that coreutils is also in play, I think one of us will make the time.
