[lug] Automake question: Checking for subdirs?

[Scott A. Herod]

Tom Tromey wrote:
> 
> >>>>> "Scott" == Scott A Herod <herod at interact-tv.com> writes:
> 
> Scott> Another automake question if you don't mind.  With automake you
> Scott> can add SUBDIRS and the resulting Makefiles will recursively
> Scott> enter these directories.  However, the scripts don't check to
> Scott> see if the subdirectories actually exist.  I'd like to wrap a
> Scott> test around the scripts in the Makefile that verifies the
> Scott> subdirectory exist before descending into it.  Will I have to
> Scott> change the configuration defined in /usr/share/automake/ to do
> Scott> that?
> 
> You don't want to do that, since that would mean that your users
> wouldn't be able to rebuild their Makefile.in's -- or in other words,
> you'd be forking automake.

Good point.  Changing automake would be bad.

> Ordinarily if you want to conditionally build a subdirectory, you do
> the checking in configure and define SUBDIRS based on the results.

So, if I understand this, in configure.in I call

AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS(all possible subdirectories)

I see where those directories appear in the created configure but
don't see that the directories that it actually found is saved.
Do I need to call AC_CHECK_FILES for each directory and save the
results?  subdirs contains the entire list of subdirectories.

Scott