> there have been concerns that reading, parsing, and calculating the
> dependency tree of the 3752 makefiles (in netbsd-3) would take too
> long, (without any hard numbers to back these claims),

Based on my experience watching slow machines sit and think for long
periods of time digesting the 1.4T libc Makefile, I suspect that it
might not even *work* to try to do a single unified make run for the
whole source tree - unless make gets a great deal more efficient in
both time and memory.

> but somehow doing a recursive make and parsing those files
> individually and not correctly expressing inter-directory
> dependencies is acceptable.

Acceptable, as in, it mostly works, instead of sitting and thinking for
hours and then falling over for lack of memory?

Yes, I call that acceptable - as in "acceptable compromise".  I'd
rather have a system that builds suboptimally than a system that
doesn't build.  And while I haven't actually tried it (though I gather
you haven't either), I suspect those would be our choices.

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