link: "Recursive Make Considered Harmful"

[Matthew Dillon]

    I gotta say, I think the author is off-track on this one.  The trade off
    here is simplicity in design vs time.  I far prefer keeping the design
    simple (aka recursive).

    A very large project would be large enough to make it worth constructing
    a tool to bypass the recursive build to make incremental builds less time
    consuming, but I would never want such a tool to *replace* the core
    recursive build infrastructure.  Large projects always have a huge
    number of special cases... for example, even with DragonFly you can't
    always do a 'quickworld' and have it work, and if quickworld doesn't work
    in a situation I can guarentee you that these flattening tools will not
    work either.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>