Re: Substitutions in _SOURCES

[Timo K Suoranta]

>    GNOME_GEN_H_FILES=`cd $srcdir/src ; ls *.gen_h | xargs echo`
>    AC_SUBST(GNOME_GEN_H_FILES)

This very much looks like the 'Large project support', or 'wildcard
automake' issue which I recently asked about. In general automake wants
that the source file list is not generated by any wildcard means. It
appears to go so far in its paradigm that it tries to detect some
known workarounds like this.

>   gnomemm_gen_files = $(shell cd $(top_srcdir)/src; ls *.gen_h | xargs echo)
>   gnomemmc = wrap.cc $(gnomemm_gen_files:.gen_h=.cc) gnome--.cc
>
> Automake will accept this, allthough it's in the end the same substitution,
> only this time not via configure.

I think there is no foolproof way to detect all possible workarounds. My
lucky guess is that neither wildcards nor wildcard workarounds are
considered acceptable. Automake simply does not like the wildcard feature.

My opionion is that make sucks, and all patches built on top of it,
including but not limited to autotools and automake thus suck. The
alternatives can not offer the portability offered by autotools though :/

I have been thinking about making yet another tool on top of automake
which would generate Makefile.am files. It would make the path from
project file to make even longer and more perverted, but at least it would
maintain portability, and it would work.

Such thing actually already exists: gpt_setup in the Globus toolkit,
http://www-unix.globus.org/packaging/rfc.html. Looks interesting, but I
haven't had yet time to look into it :/

Hopefully the old make will be dead some day and we have something nice..


-- Timo Suoranta -- address@hidden --