[lug] [OT] automake question

[Scott Herod]

On 4 May 2003, Tom Tromey wrote:

> >>>>> "Scott" == Scott Herod <herod at dimensional.com> writes:
> 
> Scott> For better or worst, one thing that the existing Makefiles do
> Scott> is allow people to add source files without touching any of the
> Scott> Makefiles.
> 
> Scott> I tried doing so with something like:
> Scott>     main_SOURCES = @f_main_srcs@
> 
> Scott> Makefile.am:6: `main_SOURCES' includes configure substitution
> 
> Bad news: this is something you can't do with automake.  New automakes
> give an error, as above; old ones just generate bad code.
> 
> This idea comes up from time to time on the automake list.  You can
> read all the discussions (some reasoned, some not :-) in the archives.
> 
> Basically, automake needs to know the source file names statically in
> order to implement certain features.  Also, I've long opposed this
> feature on robustness grounds; I think the current maintainers are
> also opposed.

Thanks Tom.  I'm personally opposed to the automatic determination of
source files esp. as there is now a lot of code generation happening.  
The source files for the generator have to be special cases anyway.  
(That's really a nightmare under the current system since they use a
cross-compiler already.)

If I can't argue them out of it, perhaps I'll just get a bit of perl to 
generate parts of the Makefile.am's.  After all, the list of sources had 
better be fixed whenever a release is cut.

Scott