Re: Ignoring failures in AC_OUTPUT

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Kristis,

Sorry for the delay -- the list server was/is having some issues.

* Kristis Makris wrote on Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 12:02:58AM CET:
> Hello. Is there a way to tell autoconf to ignore failures by AC_OUTPUT
> to create a file ? Right now, if one .in file is missing, autoconf
> refuses to continue.
> 
> This feature could be useful when one is maintaining private sources
> that need help from autoconf to autogenerate some Makefiles, but yet
> should not be part of an official release of a project. These sources
> could be for example a prototype of a researcher that does not want to
> release his source. This prototype could be used by an autoconf-managed
> project as part of testing, but should not be part of the public source
> distribution.

What you could do is just not list these files in AC_CONFIG_FILES.
Then you need to adjust your build steps so that after configure is run,
you do
  ./config.status extra/Makefile extra2/Makefile

manually; if you use Automake (and don't disable dependency tracking)
you'll want to append `depfiles' to that line as well, and do a
  automake extra/Makefile extra2/Makefile

after the regular automake.

But all of this is very brittle and error-prone.  You're probably easier
off to have the developer install Autoconf and Automake, and have him
change one SUBDIRS line in Makefile.am and a couple of lines in
configure.ac.

Cheers,
Ralf