Apparently a small meme has spread in the gnome community, the non-recursive automake meme.
Well, rewriting the makefiles for rygel to use the new Vala support in automake-1.11 I also converted it to be non-recursive.
This is what I got:
Parallel builds working (but this seems to be more the work of the Vala support)
Cleaner Makefiles, less [...]