[U-Boot] Nested Makefiles

[Simon Glass]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 12:53 PM, Mike Frysinger <vapier at gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 18:03, Wolfgang Denk <wd at denx.de> wrote:
>> I think it is fundamentally wrong to implement such a feature (let's
>> call it "terse make output") in the Makefiles of many projects, using
>> a lot of trickery and magic.  If a specific verbosity of make output
>> is needed, this should most naturally be implemented as a feature in
>> make itself - we already have make options like "-d" (for very verbose
>> output) or "-s" (for silent mode), so why not add a new verbosity
>> level which produces exactly the short output format you want?
>>
>>
>> So yes, patches are welcome, but these should go directly to the make
>> mailing lists / patch system, see
>> http://savannah.gnu.org/mail/?group=make
>
> not to kick sand just for fun, but this is an example of you getting
> final veto power.  this has been requested by many people, and ive
> seen very few people against it (off the top of my head, i can only
> recall you, but i havent looked at previous threads to be sure).
>
> i'm not saying your logic is without merit, just that in all
> practicality, i dont think it's going to happen the way you desire.
> -mike
>

Hi,

Great to see the discussion here. My feeling is that the right
approach is for the subdir Makefiles to be #included so that make can
operate the way it was originally intended (full tree dependency). We
don't have the kind of memory limitations that once made the size of
its dependency table worth worrying about.

The verbosity or not of make is mostly a side issue in my view since
it is possible to have this approach and still print all the gcc
commands lines. I don't personally find it useful 90% of the time, but
that's personal preference. The one message that I think is
superfluous is 'Entering directory... / Leaving directory ...'.
Perhaps there is disagreement on this too? I think it is better to
include the full path with each filename that is built. My IDE agrees
:-)

The change I am talking about does not affect make at all, and I can't
think what manner of patches might get make to automatically build a
picture from all subdirectories before starting its work. If I were
the make maintainer I would almost certainly reject them.

I would like to name this feature 'Full dependency make' instead of
'terse make output'. The terse-ness could be an option.

Who was it that volunteered to modify the makefiles? :-) I was very
encouraged by Mike's comment earlier:

> indeed.  it shouldnt be that bad now that more stuff has converted to
> FOO-$(CONFIG) syntax.  it could probably even be done piece by piece rather
> than the whole tree to make transition easier.

Indeed it is not like the U-Boot subdir Makefiles are a mess - they
are pretty tidy and describe the dependencies in a clean way that
should be usable when included by a top-level Makefile.

Regards,
Simon