Parallel Make in OTP

[Peter-Henry Mander]

Hi Gentlepeople,

There's a thread on erlang-bugs list discussing "Recursive Make
Considered Harmful" [1] Which inspired me while I struggled with
parallel make in our T-Build system in T-Mobile [2]. Despite the lack
of activity on Code.Google.Com, I actively maintain T-Build in house.

I want to put my oar in and respectfully ask not to ditch Gnu Make in
OTP. It's a much maligned beast with an ugly syntax, but it's a
phenomenally powerful one. Other build tools just don't cut it. Having
make --jobs fail on the OTP build is an itch I yearn to scratch for a
long time.

There are currently 317 Makefiles in OTP, and I want to reduce it to
only one, like in T-Build. Once it is updated, the single Makefile
will not need further editing to accommodate new files in the build,
as Make can search the whole project to resolve all dependencies.

I can't get my hand dirty just yet, paid work must be done first.

Pete.

[1] http://miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/books/rmch/
[2] http://code.google.com/p/erlang-t-build/