Re: Announce: Kernel Build for 2.5, Release 1.1 is available.

[Keith Owens <kaos@ocs.com.au>]

On Sun, 12 Aug 2001 15:36:13 +0100, 
David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org> wrote:
>
>kaos@ocs.com.au said:
>>  The alternative of having code in some arch directory updating
>> include/asm-$(ARCH)/offsets.h is worse.  It is a terrible design to
>> have code in one makefile updating files in another directory.  It is
>> a layer violation which is always a bad idea.
>
>With sensible (i.e. non-recursive) makefiles, surely this is far more 
>acceptable?

No.  The aim is for a user to look at the makefile in a directory and
know everything that is created in that directory.  If you allow
creation of a file in one directory but storing it in another then you
have to search all makefiles to find out what is created in any
directory.  Horrible!

I was very careful to code the select() and objlink() and related
commands so they can only create files in the current directory, to
enforce a clean design.  You can read a file from another directory but
you cannot write a file to another directory.