Re: Recursive targets for the user

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Stefano Lattarini wrote on Mon, Aug 02, 2010 at 09:25:46PM CEST:
> At Monday 02 August 2010, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:

> > > Also, I'd like to have a way to specify a recursive targers which
> > > should recurse in a limited set of a projects' subdirectories,
> > > and not in all of $(SUBDIRS).  Do you think this would be
> > > possible/worthwhile?
> > 
> > Can you give an example what this would be good for?
> Yes, I'd like to be able to do what proposed in this old patch series 
> of mine:
>  <http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg01848.html>
> without having to recurse to ugly cut-and-paste from lib/am/subdirs.am 
> internals, like this:

Yes, that would be usable with the new approach I suggested.  Thanks for
reminding me of your older report.

> > My idea was
> > that if the user adds a recursive target but then doesn't specify
> > an *-am rule in some directory, that the rule would just traverse
> > that directory without doing anything by default.
> But would it still recurse in that directory's subdirectories?

Yes.

> If yes, 
> everything's fine with your approach (even if we could then IMHO find 
> a better naming than `*-am' for recusrive rules, but this is a minor 
> point).

Why, what's wrong with just documenting *-am?

> Otherwise, if I wanted a recursive target `foo' descending in say, 
> bar/tests/ and baz/quux/tests/,  it would still be necessary for
> me to add dummy `foo-am' (or `foo'?) targets to bar/Makefile.am, 
> baz/Makefile.am and baz/quux/Makefile.am, and a dummy dependency like 
> `foo-am: foo' to bar/tests/Makefile.am and baz/quux/tests/Makefile.am.

No; the idea is that these dummies are added by automake already.

Hmm, we might still need a way to differentiate between recursions that
need to go into $(DIST_SUBDIRS) rather than $(SUBDIRS) ...

Cheers,
Ralf