Re: automake and AC_CONFIG_FILES($foo)

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Harlan" == Harlan Stenn <address@hidden> writes:

Harlan> One of the biggest apparent hurdles is that these folks would
Harlan> benefit from having a single monolithic Makefile.am at the top
Harlan> level, as that would provide the best parallel makes, provide
Harlan> the best library dependency stuff, run the fastest, etc.
Harlan> OTOH, it would be Difficult to coordinate changes to this
Harlan> Makefile.am (lots of developers) and they still want the
Harlan> ability to run a make in a subdir.

These goals (monolithic Makefile.am and run make in a subdir) are
really not compatible.  The `import' plan would let you run `make
subdir/all', which is similar, but that plan is still on the drawing
boards.

Harlan> Other problems include about 160 Makefile.am's that use
Harlan> automake conditionals to decide if certain _PROGRAMS need to
Harlan> be made or not, and in many cases, which target-specific
Harlan> _SOURCES need to be used.

Wow.

Harlan> I arrived just after the conversion from automake-1.4 to 1.5,
Harlan> and based on my current efforts I'm probably going to
Harlan> recommend we look at upgrading to 1.6.1 just to quiet some of
Harlan> the "automake does not support XXX being defined
Harlan> conditionally" messages.

I think that's smart.  From what I know right now I'd say 1.6.1 is a
lot less buggy and difficult to use than 1.5.

Harlan> I'm actually considering looking at keeping the Makefile.am's
Harlan> in each subdir and looking at AutoXport to combine this info
Harlan> into a top-level .xml file and then see if that .xml file can
Harlan> be easily converted to a Jakarta/ant build.xml file.

That sounds frightening.
I haven't looked at Ant too much.  I read a bit about it last week.
It sounds like it doesn't really track dependencies at all.  Perhaps I
missed that section of the manual.

Tom