[erlang-questions] Rebar dependency recursion

[Tuncer Ayaz]

On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 8:00 PM, Tim Watson wrote:
> This is all fine, but it's mighty annoying to have run rebar
> repeatedly because you want to get-deps first then do something
> else.

The idea with dss-fix-skip-deps in its current form is that you only
initially would do 'rebar -r g-d com'.

> Modules already have a way to indicate that they want recursion -
> preprocess/2. Can this be extended so that modules can say 'I want
> recursion' or [predirs] or ok/nothing? Then you'd get a nice
> interplay where rebar_deps says [predirs] and rebar_compile says
> 'yes please' to the recursion into those predirs but rebar_templater
> says 'no thanks' to them and you can chain commands cleanly without
> invoking rebar multiple times.
>
> In that scheme, -r means 'override the guys who said no to
> recrusion'

So your idea is that commands should explicitly announce if they want
to be used recursively and otherwise ignore non-base_dir applications
with -r meaning "force all commands to process deps/sub_dirs", right?
How would you handle the case that compile is happy to process
sub_dirs/deps but you want to compile just base_dir?