Category Archives: Linux

The new automake meme

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 code duplication
  • No possibility to call “make install” for a single plugin only
  • No to very minor speed gain

All in all, this seems less improvement than expected, but the cleanliness of the Makefile.am is worth the minor inconveniences generated by that, though it still needs some more cleanup and flags unification.