Re: automake during development

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 17 Nov 2004, Jonathan wrote:

> Hi, I'm having trouble finding an answer to this question:
>
> My team is trying to use automake for a C++ project we are developing.
> The project design has been changing rapidly and we are finding that
> keeping the list of source files in Makefile.am up to sync with the
> contents of the directory is very inconvenient.
>
> An ideal solution would generate an object file for each .cpp file in
> the directory but I cannot seem to find information on doing this with
> automake.  Information I do find seems to point to wildcard solutions
> not being portable.

Wildcard solutions could be portable as long as the wildcard was 
performed by the 'automake' program.  However, it does not support 
that (as far as I know).  Automake developers feel that package 
developers should be more careful/responsible than to build and 
distribute whatever files happen to be available.

What you can do is create a utility which is a Makefile.am generator. 
It would perform substitutions to create the Makefile.am which is used 
by Automake.

So then you have (assuming your template file uses extension ".amt")

  Makefile.amt
                \
                 \
                  utility --> Makefile.am --> Makefile.in --> Makefile
                 /
                /
   source files

:-)

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen