Re: make distcheck failure

[Bruce Korb]

On 03/31/12 01:34, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> > Is this a known problem or do I need to investigate further?
> The issue you're facing sounds new to me, so I say some more investigations
> are warranted.  Could you maybe post a minimal reproducer of the issue here,
> so that we can decide whether it is a user error, a documentation weakness,
> or an automake bug?

By the time I have a "minimal reproducer", I'll likely know the cause.
Below is the invocation that causes the disappearance of xml2ag/Makefile.
After the successful completion of the command, the file was, indeed, gone.
So I've done verbose output:
  Invoking recipe from Makefile:420 to update target `installcheck-recursive'.

So that has me closer.  The top level installcheck-am causes the problem.
I modified the $(RECURSIVE_TARGETS) rule:

> $(RECURSIVE_TARGETS):
>         PS4='>$@> ' ; test -f xml2ag/Makefile ; set -x ; \
>         fail= failcom='exit 1'; \
>         for f in x $$MAKEFLAGS; do \
>           case $$f in \
>             *=* | --[!k]*);; \
>             *k*) failcom='fail=yes';; \
>           esac; \
>         done; \
>         dot_seen=no; \
>         target=`echo $@ | sed s/-recursive//`; \
>         list='$(SUBDIRS)'; for subdir in $$list; do \
>           echo "Making $$target in $$subdir"; \
>           test -f xml2ag/Makefile ; \
>           if test "$$subdir" = "."; then \
>             dot_seen=yes; \
>             local_target="$$target-am"; \
>           else \
>             local_target="$$target"; \
>           fi; \
>           ($(am__cd) $$subdir && $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) $$local_target) \
>           || eval $$failcom; \
>         done; \
>         test -f xml2ag/Makefile ; \
>         if test "$$dot_seen" = "no"; then \
>           $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) "$$target-am" || exit 1; \
>         fi; test -z "$$fail"

<<<aside:  shouldn't that "|| exit 1" actually be "|| eval $$failcom" ??
   and, why is failcom conditionally set to "yes" instead of "true" or ":"?
   "yes" produces a lot of unnecessary output..... >>>

And the tail end of the output from "make --debug=v installcheck":

>installcheck-recursive> test -f xml2ag/Makefile
>installcheck-recursive> test no = no
>installcheck-recursive> make installcheck-am
GNU Make 3.82
[....]
Reading makefiles...
Reading makefile `Makefile'...
Updating goal targets....
Considering target file `installcheck-am'.
 File `installcheck-am' does not exist.
 Finished prerequisites of target file `installcheck-am'.
Must remake target `installcheck-am'.
Successfully remade target file `installcheck-am'.
make[1]: Entering directory `/old-home/bkorb/ag/ag/autogen-5.16pre11/_build'
make[1]: Nothing to be done for `installcheck-am'.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/old-home/bkorb/ag/ag/autogen-5.16pre11/_build'
>installcheck-recursive> test -z ''
  Successfully remade target file `installcheck-recursive'.
 Finished prerequisites of target file `installcheck'.
Must remake target `installcheck'.
Successfully remade target file `installcheck'.
$ ls xml2ag/Make*
ls: cannot access xml2ag/Make*: No such file or directory