Re: GSoC project idea: non-recursive automake project

[NightStrike]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 3:45 PM, Harlan Stenn <address@hidden> wrote:
> Pippijn wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 05:26:58PM -0700, Harlan Stenn wrote:
>> > If there was a student interested in showing how "easy" it was to use
>> > automake to do non-recursive Makefiles for a project, I'd be willing to
>> > co-mentor and work with them to convert NTP to that sort of operation.
>>
>> It's mostly trivial. How hard are GSoC projects supposed to be?
>
> I'll assume you have seen my reply to Ralf.
>
> From my POV, I have heard folks saying for a long time how "easy" it is
> to use automake to produce non-recursive Makefiles.  But I haven't seen
> this in practice, and on the (few) attempts I have made to figure it out
> myself and look for examples, I have not yet been able to find a really
> useful solution.

A solution to *what* exactly?  Said another way, what *exactly* is the
problem with automake+non-recursion that you would want solved?

I personally have found that the only obstacle to me is minor -- all
sources have to be specified relative to the top level directory, even
in a subdir Makefile fragment that gets included in the top.

> What I think we'd want is a reasonably well-documented description of
> how to use automake to produce a source tree where one can:
>
> - run "make" from the top-level of the tree and all of the normal things
>  happen (and all of the normal targets work)
> - run "make" from a subdir, which would handle all of the normal targets
>  for that subdir, and would also automatically handle *all* of the
>  dependencies needed for the specified targets in that subdir (like
>  prerequisite libraries).