Re: GSoC project idea: non-recursive automake project

[Roger Leigh]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 11:49:39AM -0400, NightStrike wrote:
> 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.

Surely even this is a solvable problem.  Can't automake rewrite the
relative paths to be absolute?  Obviously this wouldn't necessarily
work for some complex custom rules, but in the general case it would
be a big bonus.  It would also mean that any variables such as
foo_SOURCES in a subdirectory could have the absolute path prefixed
to all the files on inclusion, which would mean I could convert to
using a single top-level Makefile and keep all the separate
Makefile.ams in the subdirectories, where it makes sense to have them
alongside the code they build.

I certainly wouldn't be averse to rewriting any custom rules to gain
this.  I've wanted something like this for years, in fact.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
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