Re: Feature request

[Ben Pfaff]

Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> writes:

> * Akim Demaille wrote on Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 04:35:50PM CEST:
>>
>> I'm slowly getting rid of my recursive Makefiles.  Instead I have one  
>> local.mk per directory, and a few Makefile.ams that include them.  Of  
>> course I have to prefix all my file names with the name of the  
>> directory, and I find that this explicit name is actually clutter.  I  
>> don't think automake can be educated to guess by itself where to prepend 
>> the directory name,

I would also find a feature to reduce this clutter useful.  GNU
PSPP in particular does not use recursive makefiles and has lots
of directories.  (Although PSPP uses the file name automake.mk
instead of local.mk.)

I don't have better syntax suggestions than yours or Akim's
(unfortunately).  Except:

> I'd really hate to invade make's namespace.  They may come up with this
> really cool new makefile variable, and we can't use it then.  :-/

I wonder whether this is a real issue, because Automake cannot
really use new GNU make extensions anyhow (right?) because it
writes out portable Makefiles.  And it seems unlikely that POSIX
would start inventing new Makefile syntax either.
-- 
"Unix... is not so much a product
 as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history
 of the hacker subculture."
--Neal Stephenson