[Box Backup-dev] Build system

[Ben Summers]

On 9 Dec 2005, at 12:55, Chris Wilson wrote:

> Hi Ben,
>
> I have a question about the Box build system. All the libraries  
> (common.a, etc.) have make targets that depend on the dep_modules  
> target, which is a phony target. As a result, make always rebuilds  
> the library.
>
> This is quite slow on Cygwin, and I'd like to avoid it if possible.  
> I can see why rebuilding an executable might require its  
> dependencies to be built first, but I don't think that's true for a  
> library. It should be possible to compile the module files and  
> assemble the library even if its dependencies aren't built first.
>
> Could we safely remove the dep_modules dependency from library  
> Makefiles?

Probably. You're only likely to build a bin or test executable  
anyway, so I suppose you don't need to do dependencies on libraries.

The makefiles for GNU make are a bit of a hack. With a BSD make, it's  
much neater and doesn't require all that messing around.

Ben