Re: distdir.test failures: VPATH and subdirs

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Alexandre Duret-Lutz wrote on Wed, May 10, 2006 at 11:54:46PM CEST:
> >>> "RW" == Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> writes:

>  RW> Do you think it's ok to require that `./file' should not be used?
> 
> This reminds me of a friend who used 
>   AC_CONFIG_FILES([./Makefile ./sub/Makefile])
> and I think it broke something (maybe the rebuild rules).

Yes: if Makefile.in is out of date:
| cd .. && /bin/sh /tmp/foo/config/missing --run automake-1.9 --foreign  
./Makefile
| cd . && /bin/sh ./config.status Makefile
| config.status: error: invalid argument: Makefile
$ config.status --help | grep Make
|  ./Makefile [...]

This rule also extends to stuff like
  AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR([./config])

(and macro dir) which I've seen in packages out there.

>  RW> Should it be documented in automake.texi?  
>  RW> Alternatively, should EXTRA_DIST be rewritten by Automake
>  RW> to kill leading "./"?
> 
> It's best if we can avoid rewriting anything. 
> Maybe we could find a way to warn against it (with -Wportability).

Good idea.  But we'd have to keep in mind that using
  ./file

is good (and may even be necessary) for files created in the build tree.
(It may be necessary if those files are ever referenced as prerequisites
that way.)

> I think ideally Automake should diagnose file names that
> are referenced differently in targets and dependencies.

Yep.  I think just finding this out could be quite expensive though,
and running `automake' already is very expensive, sometimes by far
the most expensive part of a bootstrap.

> I'm currently writing an introductory chapter for the manual
> (partly based on my tutorial), and plan to reorganize and add a
> few sections that introduce the naming conventions and the
> general syntax (the manual doesn't describe the Makefile.am
> syntax so far, srcdir isn't even introduced).  I hope it will be
> easier to explain how and when to use ./, $(srcdir), etc., after
> that.

Great!

>  RW> * tests/distdir.test: Do not use leading `./' in EXTRA_DIST for
>  RW> files in the source tree.  Fixes failures with HP-UX and Tru64
>  RW> make.
> 
> Agreed.

I've applied that; thanks for the review!

Cheers,
Ralf