vpath and `make dist' interaction

[Jeff Bailey]

Heya,

I'm hacking on moving the Hurd build environment to using automake.  We
have a glibc-style sysdeps/ structure (sysdeps/general,
sysdeps/{microkernel}, and sysdeps/{processor}) for one of our
directories.  

The thread starting at
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/automake/1999-06/msg00098.html says pretty
clearly that VPATH isn't supported, so I'm not sure what's the best
thing to do.  For other places where it's pretty obvious where the
sources lie, I've used $(processor)/filename, but in a number of cases I
need to pick the one up from the generic directory.

I think ideally what I would like is to have a nodist_ prefix or
something for sources that rely on being picked up from various sysdeps
places.  It could either know that some files might be in the current
directory and the rule automake generates would only pick those up, or I
would just have to EXTRA_DIST those ones.  If this works for you guys, I
can try and put together a patch.  Instead of taking foo_SOURCES, I
would generate a new variable of all the files that are actually there
and put them in a variable called foo_DIST_SOURCES and use that in
DIST_SOURCES.

Tks,
Jeff Bailey