[Cmake] Non recursive makefiles

[William A. Hoffman]

Right now there is no way to create non-recursive makefiles.
We have some plans to create non-recursive makefiles.  However,
I am not sure one large makefile will scale for larger projects.
We have had problems with make on various systems and large files, or
too many dependencies.  We have seen that problem even with the
recursive make that we use.  So, I don't really agree with the paper
on that point.   If you are interested in trying a non-recursive
generator, I could point you at the right places in the code.
It would involve creating new class like cmLocalUnixMakefileGenerator.cxx.

However, since cmake is creating the makefiles for you, many of the disadvantages
of recursive make are avoided, for example you should not have to debug
the makefiles or even think about how they work.   There are other examples
of things in that paper that cmake fixes for you as well.  

-Bill


At 02:24 PM 1/30/2004, Vivek Rajan wrote:

>Hi Cmake users,
>
>I currently use GNU makefiles for my projects and they port easily to most unix platforms. But that's not the case with Visual Studio / Windows. So I'm looking at moving my projects over to use CMake.
>
>I've started looking at CMake and the makefiles generated by it are recursive makefiles. Now, non-recursive makefiles are considered to better than recursive ones. And the reasons why they are better is explained in the paper "Recursive Make Considered Harmful".
>http://www.pcug.org.au/~millerp/rmch/recu-make-cons-harm.html
>
>So my question is, is there a way to generate non-recursive makefiles using CMake or is there a way to extended CMake to do this?
>
>Thanks,
>-- Vivek
>
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