Re: Creating plain Makefiles with automake

[Roger Leigh]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 08:36:06AM +0100, Diego Elio Pettenò wrote:
> On 24/04/2013 00:10, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > 
> > My question is, is there any interest in this kind of approach? I feel
> > that it would be a step towards making the GNU build system easier to
> > use and understand.
> 
> As a distribution developer this seems to me just yet another hack that
> is going to cause us great pain in the future if it is found in the wild..

I'm not sure I see why.  It has the virtue of removing a step of
indirection in the intermediary Makefile.in, and so serves to
simplify things.  Including the substituted variable definitions
via a separate file would also serve to make things more robust:
there's only a single source for them, rather than duplicate
definitions across every Makefile.in.  And it's now possible to
have rules depend upon the Makefile.am, Makefile and/or the
configuration data which can then be used to trigger Makefile
regeneration and rebuilds in a more informed manner, avoiding
some of the rebuilds that now occur since you've decoupled the
make logic and configuration logic.


Regards,
Roger

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