Antwort: Re: Feature request: meta files & wildcards (once again)

[christoph.wiedemann]

alex> I think the recommended way is to add suffix rules to produce the built
alex> sources, not edit the Makefile.ins.

But is this really portable ? I looked at automake 1.4 info pages, and it tells 
something about GNU make:

> Handling new file extensions
> ============================
>
>   It is sometimes useful to introduce a new implicit rule to handle a
> file type that Automake does not know about.  If this is done, you must
> notify GNU Make of the new suffixes.  This can be done by putting a list
> of new suffixes in the `SUFFIXES' variable.
> 
>    For instance, currently Automake does not provide any Java support.
> If you wrote a macro to generate `.class' files from `.java' source
> files, you would also need to add these suffixes to the list:
> 
>      SUFFIXES = .java .class

The actual documentation at 
http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#Suffixes 
does not mention GNU make anymore ... So i am a bit confused now. 

alex> IMHO wildcarding is a separate issue, independent of whether sources are
alex> built or normal.

Yes and no. Take the example of QT's moc files. They have to be generated from 
.h files, 
if the class defined in the .h file does mention a Q_OBJECT macro. I would love 
to have 
something in my Makefiles which greps for the string Q_OBJECT in all .h files 
this directory
contains. For each file where this is found, the moc has to be started. I think 
this is not
possible at the current time without writing a script which edits the 
Makefile.in's (this is
what KDE Developers do).
Besides many developers want to use wildcarding as well even if they do or do 
not use
meta files.

Regards,
Christoph