[erlang-bugs] Re: Recursive Make Considered Harmful

[Toby Thain]

On 14-Dec-09, at 5:47 AM, Michael Turner wrote:

>
> http://miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/books/rmch/
>
> Thanks for this.  I wasn't on the list when you first mentioned this
> paper. I vaguely remembered just such a paper while trying to build an
> Erlang release a few months ago.  It struck me as a breath of fresh  
> air
> when I first read it over a decade ago.
>
> It's not so much that "make" is lacking, I think.

Right, the problem isn't with 'make' per se, which the paper serves  
to prove.

--Toby

> Mainly it's that
> the obvious approach (recursion) for building stuff out of a
> hierarchical directory structure is not necessarily the best way if
> you're using make.
>
> Having one big makefile seems, of course, horribly inelegant.  But  
> when
> I've tried that approach, it always reminds me of things I'd forgotten
> while using big, lumbering, recursive build systems.  Like, make is
> really fast.  Compilers are pretty fast, too.  And having  
> everything in
> one place can be nice.
>
> -michael turner
>
> On 12/14/2009, "Bengt Kleberg" <bengt.kleberg@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> Greetings,
>>
>> It has been well over a year since last time I mentioned this paper
>> "Recursive Make Considered Harmful",
>> (http://miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/books/rmch/). so I hope it is ok  
>> that I
>> do it again.
>>
>> Nice little reading for those that find themselves wondering if  
>> they are
>> the only ones that think make is somewhat lacking, at times.
>>
>>
>> bengt
>>
>> On Mon, 2009-12-14 at 13:02 +0300, Sergei Golovan wrote:
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>> I did some further investigations and found that simply calling make
>>> in all doc/src
>>> directories works better then trying to run make recursively.
>>>
>>> pwd=`pwd`
>>> for i in `find . -wholename '*/doc/src'` ; do
>>>     (cd $i ; make man ERL_TOP=$pwd )
>>> done
>>>
>>> (using Erlang R12B-02-1 edoc and docbuilder, and the attached  
>>> docb_gen script)
>>> generates manpages perfectly, make html and make pdf though  
>>> suffer from runtime
>>> errors while running xsltproc.
>>>
>>> Running make recursively reveals a whole bunch of problems with
>>> missing and redefined
>>> 'docs' targets in makefiles.
>>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 12:16 PM,  <lars@REDACTED> wrote:
>>>> Hi Sergei,
>>>> we started to build our documentation with open source tools in  
>>>> R13B03 so it
>>>> would be possible to build the doc from the delivered sources.
>>>>
>>>> But it's still only built in house because we hadn't time to  
>>>> test it but the plan is
>>>> to have it work for everyone in R13B04.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for your report, we'll have a look at those fault.
>>>>
>>>> Regards Lars
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Sergei Golovan wrote:
>>>>> Hi!
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm trying to build Erlang documentation from the sources (the  
>>>>> goal is
>>>>> to switch from prebuilt docs for Debian Erlang packages as  
>>>>> building
>>>>> them from the source is preferable).
>>>>>
>>>>> To do that I run
>>>>> make
>>>>> make TYPE=docs
>>>>> (in fact, make libs doesn't recognize TYPE, so I had to replace  
>>>>> "make
>>>>> opt" by "make $(TYPE) in the top-level Makefile).
>>>>>
>>>>> and I've found several problems which make build fail:
>>>>>
>>>>> 1) For some XML files (e.g. erts/docs/src/book.xml) xsltproc  
>>>>> reports
>>>>> runtime errors about undefined variables (partnum in line 871  
>>>>> and 963
>>>>> of db_pdf.xsl, in lines 1075 and 1173 of db_html.xsl). Is this  
>>>>> a bug
>>>>> in the stylesheets or in xsltproc? (Both 1.1.24 from Debian  
>>>>> stable and
>>>>> 1.1.26 from Debian unstable failed.)
>>>>>
>>>>> 2) wx application has duplicated targets html and docs in its  
>>>>> makefile.
>>>>>
>>>>> 3) wx application (and others too) require docb_gen script to  
>>>>> generate
>>>>> XML docs sources. It is missing. (I suppose that it is a simple
>>>>> wrapper around docb_gen Erlang module and could be recreated,  
>>>>> but It'd
>>>>> be better if it were shipped in Erlang sources.)
>>>>>
>>>>> Is Erlang documentation supposed to be buildable from the  
>>>>> source, or
>>>>> it still requires some unavailable tools?
>>>>>
>>>>> Cheers!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ________________________________________________________________
>>> erlang-bugs mailing list. See http://www.erlang.org/faq.html
>>> erlang-bugs (at) erlang.org
>>
>>
>> ________________________________________________________________
>> erlang-bugs mailing list. See http://www.erlang.org/faq.html
>> erlang-bugs (at) erlang.org
>>
>>
>
> ________________________________________________________________
> erlang-bugs mailing list. See http://www.erlang.org/faq.html
> erlang-bugs (at) erlang.org
>