Re: Module hierarchies

[Markus Mottl <mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at>]

On Tue, 09 Jan 2001, Dave Berry wrote:
> I don't agree with the final section though.  It's trying to make the
> "single makefile" solution fit all projects.  I don't think this holds for
> the case where sub-projects are producing separate deliverables, such as
> DLLs, ActiveX controls or JavaBeans.  In such cases you want to minimise (or
> eliminate) dependencies from one component to the internals of another, and
> separate makefiles look the best way to go.

To my knowledge it is possible to include "recipes" (the equivalent of
a Makefile) with "cook" (the "better make"). So it is not the case that
you have to maintain the whole make-process in a single file: they can
all reside in the directory that they control. The big difference is
how dependencies are considered: "cook" analyses all of them at once
instead of delegating work to some other make-process, which is the
cause of unnecessarily long build times. As the author explains, it is
only possible to have minimal build times if all dependencies are known
at once to construct a complete dependency graph.

In the (nearer) future I'll try out "cook" in more detail and eventually
write general recipes for OCaml. This might make build processes of large
and complex projects more efficient. Only (and a serious) shortcoming:
"cook" is not very widespread and you'll therefore need Makefiles, too,
if you ship source code...

- Markus Mottl

-- 
Markus Mottl, mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at, http://miss.wu-wien.ac.at/~mottl