Re: extending automake support for exotic languages

[Alexandre Duret-Lutz]

>>> "Guillaume" == Guillaume Rousse <address@hidden> writes:

 Guillaume> Hello.

 Guillaume> A colleague of mine developped a custom language for
 Guillaume> natural language processing, called DyALog
 Guillaume> (http://atoll.inria.fr/~clerger/work.html#DyALog). In
 Guillaume> order to ease module development, he also extended
 Guillaume> automake to support this language. However, he is
 Guillaume> currently maintaining it as a patch against current
 Guillaume> automake version, which is quite a nightmare.

 Guillaume> Is there a more convenient way for doing this ? 

Right now I believe the only maintainable way is to distribute a
Makefile fragment that contains the suffix rules for your
language, and let users include this fragment in their
Makefile.am.  This won't cope with per-target flags, or subdir
compilation without subdir-objects, but that should be pretty
usable nonetheless.

There is a long-term plan for modularizing Automake to ease the
addition of new features (using Perl modules).  However such
overhauling of the Automake internal is not easy, and given the
current development pace you should not expect this to happen
any time soon.  Unless somebody comes and helps.
(http://sources.redhat.com/automake/contribute.html)
Unfortunately I'm maintaining Automake almost alone, with
limited time, and my priorities are to correct bugs and to
improve the documentation.

 Guillaume> I suppose you don't intend to accept a patch for
 Guillaume> every minor research language in the world.

Indeed.
-- 
Alexandre Duret-Lutz