Nonrecursive Makefile.am: Ensuring directory creation?

[Jack Kelly]

Hello list,

I am writing a nonrecursive Makefile.am, and cannot find the
recommended way of requiring that directories in the source tree have
had their equivalents created in the build tree. This has led me to
write rules like this:

8<---
doc/fake437-primitive.texi: doc/$(am__dirstamp)
include/fake437/primitive.h; $(EXTRACT_TEXI)
--->8

but I feel that using anything starting with $(am__) is asking for
trouble by relying on internal details.

There's no mention of "dirstamp" in the info file and Googling didn't
yield anything useful either.

Does anyone have suggestions of where to look or better approaches?

-- Jack