Re: what is this shell call trying to solve?

[Alexandre Duret-Lutz]

>>> "Raja" == Raja R Harinath <address@hidden> writes:

 Raja> But, we're talking about suffix rules like
 Raja> [ ... ]
 Raja> $(LTCOMPILE) -c -o $@ `test -f $< || echo '$(srcdir)/'`$<

 Tom> I think that is probably a bug.  I can't think of why we'd be doing
 Tom> that intentionally.  Can you?  Akim, do you know?

 Raja> IIRC, it was added by Alexandre Oliva.  The only reason I can think
 Raja> of is a really really broken VPATH implementation: one that fails to
 Raja> attach to the source filename the VPATH component it found the source in.
The patch was submitted by Gordon Matzigkeit:
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/bug-automake/2000/msg00038.html

At this time, there were no explicit rules, only suffix rules.
So indeed this must fix something related to bad VPATH handling.
-- 
Alexandre Duret-Lutz