Re: help with magically appearing _OBJECTS variable

[Ben Smith]

Richard, thank you for the reply.  Automake 1.5 solves the problem, more 
details below.

On 22 Sep 2001, Richard Boulton wrote:

> On Sat, 2001-09-22 at 00:07, Ben Smith wrote:
> > I didn't have this problem until I introduced the conditionals in the 
> > Makefile.am.
> 
> I can't say why this problem is happening since I've not got 1.4p4
> installed, and havn't time to try it out.  However, having worked on
> fixing it for 1.5, I can say that the conditional code in the 1.4 branch
> was severely broken in several ways.  There's little prospect of anyone
> doing the work required to backport the fixes to the 1.4 series.

Okay, good to know.  

> (There's hardly enough developer time on this project to support 1.5)  I
> suspect the most practical solution is to move to 1.5 and fix the "slew
> of other issues" that produces.
> 

Honestly, I didn't look too in-depth at those issues.  I just saw that I got 
several warnings about macros being undefined and probably some other things 
and decided that I'd rather see what people on the mailing list thought.

> In any case, we would greatly appreciate reports of issues with automake
> 1.5.
> 

I resolved the issues, they were easy enough to fix.  The first bit of it was 
warnings when am 1.5 read the aclocal.m4 that had been added to by 
automake1.4-p4 and 1.4-p5, not surprising it didn't like that.  The second was 
adding my libtool.m4 to a place where automake would be happy with it.

My only real resistance to using 1.5 was it's not yet installed via debian 
unstable, and I wasn't sure if others would need am 1.5 to build my software.  
They don't.

My conditionals in my Makefile.am work just fine with automake 1.5.  I have 
tried it on machines with SDL and without, everything seems cool.

> Sorry not to have an easy fix.
> 
> -- 
> Richard
> 

Well, it wasn't very hard, either.  Another option for me may have been to put 
all the optional stuff in a separate directory and add that directory via 
@extra tests@ to one of the Makefile.am files.  I didn't try this because I'm 
happy with the current resolution.

Thank you, and others that work on this tool.  I really don't want to deal with 
the multi-platform compilation nightmare.  I appreciate all the work you guys 
do, it makes it easier for me to reach a lot of people with my projects.

-b