OT: [erlang-bugs] Re: Recursive Make Considered Harmful

[Bengt Kleberg]

Greetings,

Perhaps I am  mistaken, but I think the solution presented in the paper,
while being better than recursive make, is cumbersome and fragile. So I
would say that make is lacking, once the project leaves a single
directory.


bengt

On Mon, 2009-12-14 at 13:07 -0500, Toby Thain wrote:
> 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!
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
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> >>> erlang-bugs (at) erlang.org
> >>
> >>
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> >>
> >>
> >
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