[Dune-devel] behaviour of "make build_tests"

[Christian Engwer]

Hi Christoph,

> Some people say recursive makefiles are slow or plain evil. As
> it has a use-case, I don't follow this argument. Still, it is
> a limitation from CMake. We know about it since Dominic
> implemented headercheck.

that is not fully true. The buildin "make test" can be called from any
directory, although I assue that it is always the same top-level
target that is executed. In this sense (a) is something the cmake
people are doing themself.

> I tried to find a source for the reason or whether this is
> documented somewhere, but I could not find anything related. For
> sure there is some rational behind it.
> 
> 
> >a) the command is available in every subdirectory
> >and if possible (I'm aware that cmake sometimes doesn't allow everything
> >that make can do)
> 
> That's true for built-in targets like all, test, clean etc.
> 
> >b) only apply to that sub-tree.
> 
> Maybe we can create a target per test folder.
> 
> In general I don't understand why so many people want all
> targets in the top directory. Ninja-build supports only
> targets there. For IDEs like Eclipse or Visual Studio I
> get it, but not for the command line.

I agree.

Christian