On Sat, Sep 30, 2023, at 1:07 AM, Jan Engelhardt wrote: > On Saturday 2023-09-30 05:27, Dave Hart wrote: > >>I've added code to the ntp.org Makefile.am files to ensure the static >>utility library libntp.a is up-to-date for each program that uses it, to >>ensure the build is correct. When building the project, this adds a bunch >>of extra submake invocations which slows down the build. I'd like to omit >>those when --disable-dependency-tracking is used, to speed one-off builds >>that are done by end-users and packagers. > > submake is pretty much independent of and from dependency tracking. > > The general direction contemporary projects take is to just not do submake > anymore, because it's a slowdown whether or not deptracking is used.
To elaborate on that: it's been known since *1997* that recursive make is always a bad idea. See <https://grosskurth.ca/bib/1997/miller.pdf> for gory details. It's too bad that Automake still, 26 years later, can only support non-recursive builds in a fairly clunky way (manually adding subdirectory prefixes to every single object file). It shouldn't be *that* hard to make "subdirs = lib bin" mush all the rules derived from {lib,bin}/Makefile.am into the top-level generated Makefile.in, at least when there aren't any manually written rules in the subdirectories. zw