Re: false positive result with 'make distcheck'

[Harlan Stenn]

Ralf writes:

,,,

> Now, even when you stick "$(srcdir)/" in front of the prerequisites,
> still VPATH searching applies.  Since source tree of the distcheck
> source (that below /tmp/rpmbuildupdate-0.7/rpmbuildupdate-0.7) does
> not contain the *.in files, but VPATH contains "..", the `make' executed
> inside the directory /tmp/rpmbuildupdate-0.7/_build finds the file
>   ../../rpmbuildupdate.in.in
> 
> and happily uses them; that is: the second "../" is your "$(srcdir)/",
> and the first "../" is the result from make's VPATH search.
> 
> ...
> 
> Two ways to get out of this:
> - do not stick $(srcdir)/ in front of the prerequisites.  For example,
>   this should work portably (if you take care not to stick $(srcdir)/
>   elsewhere before the *.in files):
> 
> rpmbuildupdate: rpmbuildupdate.in
>       perl -pi -e s'|address@hidden@|$(sysconfdir)|' \
>         < $(srcdir)/rpmbuildupdate.in > $@
> 
> rpmbuildupdate.comp: rpmbuildupdate.comp.in
>       perl -pi -e s'|address@hidden@|$(sysconfdir)|' \
>         < $(srcdir)/rpmbuildupdate.comp.in > $@
> 
> (Note that even Solaris make would not VPATH-rewrite the rule, since the
> string `rpmbuildupdate.in' is not surrounded by white space in the rule.)

This way will not work if one wants the generated Makefiles to be useful
on several non-GNU versions of "make".

As I recently learned, if one uses $(srcdir)/foo as a target or a
dependency, one must use it in all places "foo" is referenced (including
on the command line rule of a target, or Sun's "make" (for example) will
do Interesting things.

> - Try issing distcheck from a VPATH build itself.  For example,
>   after the exact steps printed at the beginning of this mail, do:
> 
>     make distclean  # needed so configure from VPATH will not complain
>     mkdir ../build
>     cd ../build
>     ../rpmbuildupdate-0.7/configure
>     make distcheck  # fails

This seems better, from what I have seen.

H