Non-recursive make & maintenance issue

[Bob Friesenhahn]

The most non-productive aspect I have found when using Automake to
build projects in subdirectories is that it is very tedious to
translate '/'s (and other special characters) in paths and filenames
to '_' when defining target parameters. The situation becomes worse
with non-recursive approaches than the recursive approach.  The
carrying forward of this Automake approach to target parameter names
makes the Makefile much more difficult to maintain than it should be
since both non-translated and translated paths must be maintained in
the Makefile and there is ambiguity.

Perhaps it is time for Automake to re-assess this design decision.
If the capability is added to perform automatic path/filename
translation, then Automake can do the transformations for the user so
that the user never needs to deal with translated paths.  The path
translation should know how to expand macros so that target parameter
names can be built from macro components.

In other words, dealing with junk like

apps_build_postgres_src_build_postgres_SOURCES

is very tiring and failure prone.  Is there a reason why it can't
simply be

apps/build-postgres/src/build-postgres_SOURCES ?

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen