Re: Passing --add-missing when rebuilding Makefile.in

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Benoit,

* Benoit SIGOURE wrote on Tue, Oct 30, 2007 at 08:09:52AM CET:
> I find it annoying that when I have a (very) small package to which I add 
> AC_PROG_CC (for instance) in configure.ac, the next invocation of `make' 
> will fail:
>
> cd . && /bin/sh /tmp/ac/missing --run aclocal-1.10
> cd . && /bin/sh /tmp/ac/missing --run automake-1.10 --foreign
> Makefile.am: required file `./depcomp' not found
> Makefile.am:   `automake --add-missing' can install `depcomp'
> make: *** [Makefile.in] Error 1
>
> Would it be a problem if --add-missing was always passed to automake at 
> this point?

It would be an uncontrollable point in time where the developer must
take care that files are added to the source tree which she may want
to put in version control.  Not all developers omit installed and
generated files from version control!  For them it's good to delimit
when such files are added.

To answer your (presumably) next question: if you add a C-compiled
program for the first time in this Makefile.am, and issue `make',
the missing `depfiles' argument will cause .deps/* not to be
created.  No, I don't know a good solution to that.

Cheers,
Ralf