[lug] autoconf/automake

[Walter Pienciak]

On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, D. Stimits wrote:

> I'm trying to convert a project for autoconf/automake, primarily on
> Linux. I'm having problems getting the setup to recognize subdirectories
> when looking for source files. If I include a SUBDIRS line in
> Makefile.am, it apparently ignores this, and ./configure will end up
> saying:
> configure: error: can not find sources in . or ..
>
> Can anyone here tell me how to set up subdirectories if the base of the
> project has a subdirectory "src", and that in turn has a subdirectory
> for a particular program (several programs in the package) in
> subdirectory "server"? E.G., ./src/server/ has a project, ./src/client/
> has a project. Subdirectories seem to break everything.

Here's a quote from the New Riders book "GNU Autoconf, Automake, and
Libtool":

"You might think that Automake would use 'SUBDIRS' to see which
Makefile.am to scan, but it actually gets this information from
configure.in.  This means that if you have a subdirectory optionally
built, you should still list it unconditionally in your call to
AC_OUTPUT, and then arrange for it to be substituted (or not, as
appropriate) at configure time."

Walter