How to make without creating dependency in Mingw?

[lj-cug]

Dear Developers:
Now I compile ESMF-8.9.0 using mingw, cl and ifx compilers in Windows OS. Many bugs for compiling source code in Windows, now I need to debug the code.
How could I make to compile the code without creating the dependency in the first stage of building, which costed much time ? I want to compile the code directly.
Thanks
Li Jian

[DWesl]

I think you are asking how to build ESMF without having to run make at least twice in every directory in the repository (more if that directory is relevant to the build target), since starting a new process is a fairly expensive on Windows. Given the comment here documenting the current build-system, I do not think that is possible with the current build-system.

The long-term fix for this would be to use a different build-system. I would recommend against Autotools, as ESMF has rather a lot of dependent packages to configure and a few options during build, both of which are annoying in Autotools, though autoconf-archive may have many of the bits you need already. CMake is fairly popular among similar packages and may be a better option. In either case, it should be fairly straightforward to create a script to convert the Makefiles in each subdirectory to build-system configuration, leaving "only" the root directory with the bulk of the configuration, which is where I got stuck the last time I tried this.

[anntsay]

@lj-cug another option is do use Docker image (container): instruction for Docker