Re: Improvement on parallel make

[Brendan Heading]

Christophe Lyon writes: 

> Sure, it's not difficult to replace
> all: all-subdir all-local
> by
> all:
>    $(MAKE) all-subdir
>    $(MAKE) all-local 
>
> but, I don't want to introduce *recursive* calls to make. 

If you want to call a third party Makefile, you've got no choice. You 
already have a recursive make, parallel or not. 

BTW your example won't build those two targets in parallel, even if parallel 
compilation is possible. I'd consider the way you've done this to be bad 
practice. Instead I'd have 

all: all-subdir all-local 

.PHONY all-subdir all-local 

all-subdir:
  $(MAKE) <whatever> 

all-local:
  $(MAKE) <whatever2> 

If I wanted to make it clear that these had to be serialized, I'd just add 

all-local: all-subdir 

I find that prettier than the .WAIT syntax. Beauty is in the eye of the 
beholder in this case, but what I like about the above method is that it 
does what you are talking about right now. 

> I find this ugly
> (I'm sure you know the famous paper "Recurvise Make considered harmful), 
> it
> introduces unnecessary calls to make and exposes dependencies several 
> times.

Recursion in Makefiles is horrible but you usually have no choice if you're 
calling a third party Makefile. 

> Writing
> all: all-subdir .WAIT all-local
> is just as easy, and it's more obvious to understand why it is written 
> this
> way.

Call me obtuse, but I still dislike this syntax.