Re: Patch for autoconf/145

[Pavel Roskin]

Hello, Ralf!

>>> Unfortunately, ignoring this still leaves us with the original reason for 
>>> the
>>> magic.  That reason is that the user may want to add paths to VPATH and this
>>> doesn't necessarily mean shooting herself in the foot.  As long as she 
>>> leaves
>>> @srcdir@ in there, everything Automake & Autoconf depended on for building 
>>> out
>>> of tree should still work, but Autoconf doesn't know in advance whether the
>>> user did this or not.
>
> How about allowing @top_srcdir@ in VPATHs? IMHO, this would be more
> handy than @srcdir@ if _really_ exploiting VPATH for building.

Portable projects should not _really_ exploit VPATH. The GNU build tools
support even versions of make that don't interpret VPATH at all.

Building the project in a separate tree is an optional feature that is
only available with makes supporting VPATH. It is sufficient for VPATH to
be equal srcdir to enable this optional feature.

Regards,
Pavel Roskin