Newbie questions

[Steven Eker]

I'm converting a large program to autoconf/automake and I've run into
a number of problems:

(1) How do I ensure a particular file gets recompiled everytime (just
    before) a program is linked (say to update the build time via
    __DATE__ and __TIME__)? Previously I just put this before the link
    command:

    maude: <deps>
      $(CXX) <flags> -c banner.cc -o banner.o
      $(CXX) <flags> banner.o <modules> <libs> -o maude

    But now automake generates the link command.

(2) In the same vain, how do I use a tool like purify that needs to
    see the link command? Previously I had a target like:

    maude.purify: <deps>
      $(CXX) <flags> -c banner.cc -o banner.o
      $(PURIFY) $(PURIFY_FLAGS) \
      $(CXX) <flags> banner.o <modules> <libs> -o maude.purify

(3) I have a lot of .cc files that are not compiled but are included
    by other .cc files for various reasons. I can't put these in
    maude_SOURCES since I don't want them compiled but of course they
    have to be distributed, so I put them in EXTRA_maude_SOURCES. Is
    there a better way?

(4) I notice that the top level Makefile produced by automake tries to
    do an autoconf and configure even though I just did a
    configure. I've noticed this with other packages over the years
    but just ignored it; but it can be really annoying when the hosts
    autoconf is old and doesn't look for configure.ac

One slightly amusing thing - I see in section 9.4 of the automake
manual the example program is called maude... Well my program is
really called maude and has been for many years:
http://maude.cs.uiuc.edu

Steven Eker
http://www.csl.sri.com/people/eker/