Re: BTW: This is not the last problem

[Adriaan de Groot]

On 25 Apr 2002, Tom Tromey wrote:

> >>>>> "Richard" == Richard Boulton <address@hidden> writes:
>
> Richard> Executive summary: this is a KDE problem, not an automake problem.
> Richard> The problem is with the am_edit script: it doesn't understand the
> Richard> backslash-end-of-line line continuations.
>
> What does am_edit do?  I'm always curious to understand how automake
> isn't meeting its users' needs.  In other words, why does KDE need to
> do anything to automake's output?

The comment at the top of am_edit states:

# Expands the specialised KDE tags in Makefile.in to (hopefully) valid
# make syntax.

which seems clear enough to me :)

KDE has a lot of extra meta-files that need to be generated: moc files
for Qt, kidl files (and from them _skel.cpp and _stub.h) for DCOP, and
_signal.h files for DCOPSignals. These are typically not explicitly listed
in the Makefile.am. Instead, we write

        METASOURCES = auto

and let am_edit do the work.

For instance, we list thingy.ui in a _SOURCES variable. However, from this
.ui we need to *first* generate a .h, a .cpp, and a .moc file and since
automake doesn't know about that and we don't want to have to list those
files by hand in every Makefile.am, we use am_edit.

-- 
+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------+
+ Adriaan de Groot             + Project: FRESCoS                           +
+ address@hidden             + Private: address@hidden                 +
+ Kamer A6020 tel. 024 3652272 + http://www.cs.kun.nl/~adridg/frescos/      +