Re: RFC: Get rid of lib/Makefile.am

[Paolo Bonzini]

Akim Demaille wrote:
> Getting rid of this one is much more trouble than the others because of
> gnulib which is clearly not meant to be used non-recursively.  I have
> recently discovered that libltdl could be used non-recursively, and that
> was a blessing.  For gnulib, our bootstrap already goes through
> complications to avoid spending a whole directory for it alone: in lib/
> we have bison stuff, and gnulib stuff.
> 
> I don't think the gnulib people will be willing to make their tools more
> complex to support non-recursive Makefiles, so I wrote a tool to convert
> gnulib.mk into a non-recursive one.  But it's certainly fragile, and
> will probably require maintenance.
> 
> So I'm definitely ambivalent on this one.  On the one hand, the job is
> done (see the git branch candadites/lib-local-mk).  Well, some more
> comments and removing a few constants would make it better.  On the
> other hand, it's more maintenance (but if someone is tired of
> maintaining this, it is straightforward to move to using a Makefile.am
> again).
> 
> So what do you people think?

It does not seem that bad...  Also, I am pretty sure that a lot of the
changes can be automated in gnulib's module files, for example by
changing references to $(builddir) and $(srcdir) to something like
$(gnulibbuilddir) and $(gnulibsrcdir).  I don't have the time to do it
now, unfortunately.

Paolo