Re: Autoconf and Doxygen

[Braden McDaniel]

On Mon, 2007-10-08 at 10:12 +0100, Christopher Key wrote:

[snip]

> For now, the documentations gets built directly into the source tree, 
> and the relevant build commands in doc/Makefile.am.  I'm not terribly 
> happy with this as a long term solution though, it seems intuitively 
> wrong for the source tree to be modified when during a build process 
> performed in a distinct build tree.

Note that's exactly what happens when you modify Makefile.am;
Makefile.in gets automatically regenerated in srcdir.

For builds from distribution tarballs, I agree that modifying stuff in
srcdir should be off limits. But for developer builds, I think a bit
more flexibility is called for.

> I have to admit that seperating out the build step for the documentation 
> hadn't occured to me, it does seem cleaner in some ways, but there you 
> do lose the ability to automatically rebuild the documentation when 
> required.  As a compromise, I think I may add create a doc/builddocs.sh 
> script, that gets called both from my autogen.sh and from 
> doc/Makefile.am.  This way, the source tree shouldn't get modified 
> during a build unless it needs to.

You may want to have a look at what I do for OpenVRML:

        
<http://openvrml.cvs.sourceforge.net/openvrml/openvrml/doc/Makefile.am?revision=1.37&view=markup>

It works reasonably well, but with the weakness that you note: 'make
dist' won't automatically rebuild the docs if they are out of date. I
haven't figured out a solution for that.

> Dealing with unknown sets of files does seem particulary easy.  At the 
> moment, I've only got html documentation, and have borrowed FLAC's 
> system, in which the install and uninstall sections are coded manually 
> (i.e. cd html/api && install * ...).  Is there any chance that autoconf 
> / automake might be extended to allow wildcar substitution somehow, e.g.:
> 
> dist_man_MANS = man/*.[1-9]
> 
> I guess that these would have to be expanded out by autoconf rather than 
> configure.

Wildcards work in EXTRA_DIST. I've also used them successfully in my own
install-data-local rule.

-- 
Braden McDaniel                           e-mail: <address@hidden>
<http://endoframe.com>                    Jabber: <address@hidden>