On Sun, 7 Oct 2001, Frederick Bruckman wrote:

> On Sun, 7 Oct 2001 mcmahill@mtl.mit.edu wrote:
> > > can be listed as a dependency for a general ".DO_DEPENDS:" macro.
> >
> > so we'd pass down that WRKDIR to each child make?  I've been off and on
> > thinking for quite some time about a good way to solve this problem once
> > and for all.
>
> Uh, no. You figure the depends once, before you do anything in the
> DEPEND's directories, and then you do just the thing you need to do in
> each DEPEND's directory (in reverse order). No need to recurse for
> every target.

This means, of course, that you'd have to have non-recursing targets
to correspond to the recursing ones; otherwise you wouldn't save any
time at all. The "checksum" target could do for "fetch" with little
change, "real-install" possibly for "install". There could be a
"no-recurse-package" that makes binary packages encoding the DEPENDS
in the Makefile, and nothing else. Also, similar treatment for
"readme" and probably a couple of others that I haven't thought of.

Frederick