I've had a look at the patch now, and found and fixed one bug.
However, an issue comes up for VPATH builds that needs a more thorough fix: C files generated from Vala sources are shipped by "make dist" and hence end up in srcdir, but in a VPATH build with a Vala compiler, they will be in builddir. Unlike include files, you can't simply tell cc to look in two places for the file it is to compile, so some other solution is needed.
There are various other cases in which I'm aware of generated sources being shipped in tarballs, but they're all different sorts of special cases. For example, configure is shipped, but it's always in srcdir. Other files, e.g. man pages generated by help2man, have special rules to avoid regeneration, but are not themselves used to generate further files. So, I couldn't see a model to follow.
I can see a couple of options:
1. Treat valac-generated files as normal intermediate files, don't ship them in make dist, and require a Vala compiler to build Vala sources. This is not a huge deal, as almost all Vala programs will require the same libraries as Vala itself, i.e. glib (and gio?).
2. Add build-aux/valac, a "missing" script that just copies a C file from srcdir to builddir if it is newer than the corresponding Vala file, and otherwise gives an error. Using the "missing" mechanism to add limited functionality seems a fairly autotools-y thing to do.
Any other ideas?
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