RE: nobase_ room for improvement

[Robert Collins]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Tromey [mailto:address@hidden 
> Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2002 10:40 AM

> Rob> While defining a new target to be $(includedir)/foo lets 
> you work 
> Rob> around this, it would be great to do something like: 
> Rob> nobase_preserve_foo_HEADERS = ...
> 
> I have some questions about this.  What if `foo' appears 
> twice in the directory name?  What if `foo' doesn't appear?  
> Is this the most useful way to handle this feature or is 
> there another way?  In any case something along these lines 
> does make sense.  The question (for me anyway) is specifying 
> it properly.

Yeah. I fiddled around with various ideas before posting. A different
one was

nobase_include_HEADERS = ...
include_HEADERS_strip = foo/bar/delta
where foo/bar/delta is removed from the path.
 
> I've been thinking of adding a _NAME macro that would let you 
> do this.  For instance:
> 
>     bin_PROGRAMS = my-install
> 
>     my_install_SOURCES = ...
>     my_install_NAME = install
> 
> In the build tree we would build `my-install', but at install 
> time we would run the _NAME through the program transform and 
> then install the program under the resulting name.

As folk do that anyway with --program-transform-name=, a more granular
mechanism should be fairly straightforward. I like it.

 > We would do this for programs.  It would be nice to do it for 
> libraries (it has come up more than once) but it means 
> problems if programs are linked against them in the build 
> tree.  Maybe we could implement it by building the library 
> under the real name and having the _NAME name be just a 
> stamp-like file.
> 
> Any comments on this?

Sounds reasonable. What about this:

For libraries, could you tell automake to use a different name for
whatever builtin is conflicting? i.e. (using install as an example (say
I am building a module called install)).

AM_builtin_install = realinstall

and from there on in, automake uses realinstall instead of install in
all it's targets - including the install (now realinstall) target. 

Rob