Re: automake too zealous

[Rob Browning]

Thien-Thi Nguyen <address@hidden> writes:

> and we should take care not to use extension .am unless we want an
> associated "makefile".in created.

In other projects I work on, we use a trick that (ironically enough)
originally came from the guile source tree.  This trick also makes
sure that any "${}" makefile variables are actually expanded before
the substitutions, which is important if the files being generated are
in a language like scheme or C which don't do variable interpolation.

We always go from foo.in -> foo, though sometimes we'll have more than
one target with foo.in as the input file.

As an example from the gnucash src:

  ## We borrow guile's convention and use @-...-@ as the substitution
  ## brackets here, instead of the usual @address@hidden  This prevents autoconf
  ## from substituting the values directly into the left-hand sides of
  ## the sed substitutions.  *sigh*
  build-config.scm: build-config.scm.in Makefile
          rm -f address@hidden
          sed < address@hidden > address@hidden \
              -e 's:@-VERSION-@:${VERSION}:' \
              -e 's:@-GNC_CONFIGDIR-@:${GNC_CONFIGDIR}:' \
              -e 's:@-GNC_SHAREDIR-@:${GNC_SHAREDIR}:' \
              -e 's:@-GNC_HELPDIR-@:${GNC_HELPDIR}:'
          mv address@hidden $@
  CLEANFILES += build-config.scm

FWIW

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
GPG=1C58 8B2C FB5E 3F64 EA5C  64AE 78FE E5FE F0CB A0AD