Subject: Re: bug#12860: avoiding ‘check-recursive’

From: Stefano Lattarini <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2012 23:35:02 +0100

On 11/11/2012 08:40 PM, Thien-Thi Nguyen wrote:
> () Stefano Lattarini <[email-masked]>
> () Sun, 11 Nov 2012 10:11:51 +0100
> 
>    If you want to avoid recursion, you should use a non-recursive
>    Makefile.  GNU packages like Coreutils, Bison and Automake itself
>    already use such a setup in their build system, with no problem that
>    I know of.
> 
> I want to avoid recursion for "make check" only.  For everything else,
> recursion is desirable and appreciated.  Is there any way to do that?
>
Nope, sorry.

> If not, perhaps the documentation about foo-local targets "supplanting"
> Automake-generated foo targets should mention that such supplanting has
> limits, one of which is that it cannot be used to avoid recursion.
>
Actually, "foo-local" is expected to *extend*, not supplant, "foo"; and
that is a good design IMHO: otherwise you might have to re-implement the
recursion yourself every time you define a "foo-local" target in a
non-leaf Makefile.  Is there some wording in the manual that didn't make
clear this to you?  If yes, we might indeed want to fix such misleading
wording

> That way, at least, we can make progress to avoid this question
> re-arising.
> 

Thanks,
  Stefano