[MPlayer-dev-eng] .developer cruft

[Diego Biurrun]

On Sun, Apr 02, 2006 at 04:50:22AM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 02, 2006 at 10:23:00AM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > > > > The whole world does a lot of stupid things. :)))))
> > > > 
> > > > Sure, but when the world just ignores the textbook correct solution it
> > > > may also be that the textbook correct solution isn't all that hot.
> > > 
> > > There's absolutely nothing 'not all that hot' about the correct use of
> > > makefiles except that people are too stupid to write them correctly.
> > 
> > Either that or the cost benefit ratio is not appealing enough to make
> > people overcome their inertia.  I have yet to see a real world example
> > for recursive make failures.
> 
> Unless I'm misunderstanding your words this is completely false.

Let me rephrase then: Show me the code.  This is a case where it will
take more than just words to convince me, that's all.

> MPlayer is an abysmal failure at recursive make, and I've seen plenty
> of packages that do it "correctly" (with unconditional recursion)
> where it takes over a minute to decide that nothing needs to be done.
> Mozilla comes to mind as a good example.. :)

I'm not saying the MPlayer build system is good.  It's not.

> > Look at the FFmpeg build system.  Modulo a bit of cruft that still needs
> > to be moved into configure I'm rather happy how it's turning out.  It's
> > simple, it's understandable, it's (still) recursive, it works(TM).  Of
> > course, if you have further suggestions for improvement, I'm all ears.
> 
> The only 'cost' of 'monolithic' make arises in cases like this where
> you want the individual parts of a project to be able to build
> independently of one another, when taken out of the tree. This
> requires a bit of thinking (and it's the one difficulty I see in
> making the switch in MPlayer), but I think it can be handled with
> clever use of includes. I'll see what I can come up with.

This is precisely the case for FFmpeg.  As I said, if you have a clever
solution, I'm all ears.

> > > Heading this fud over and over makes me sick, and hearing it from you
> > > is even more disappointing.
> > 
> > Oh, come on, spare us the drama ;)
> 
> It's just that you're usually open to correcting broken things and
> don't side with the ignorant establishment.

That's not quite what I meant by "sparing the drama" ;)

Diego