Re: converting to subdir-objects

[Harlan Stenn]

Bob Friesenhahn writes:
> I checked the current Automake manual and am not able to find any text 
> which says that a subdirectory needs to be a subdirectory of where the 
> Makefile resides.  What is a subdirectory anyway?  The generated 
> Makefile would include per-source-file target specifications outside 
> of the directory where the Makefile resides.
> 
> Perhaps the ability to use this successfully depends on the 
> implementation of the VPATH and target resolution support in the make 
> program (and possibly make program version) that your project is 
> specifically targeting.
> 
> I can not imagine 'make dist' or 'make distcheck' working properly if 
> source files are not subordinate to the directory containing Makefile. 
> How is 'tar' supposed to work?
> 
> Harlan's posting here was due to Automake not working as he expected 
> for files which are not in a subdirectory so maybe it does not work.

'make dist' and 'make distcheck' have been working fine for a Very Long
Time in this project.

In my attempt to get subdir-objects working NTP, I added
"subdir-objects" to the list of options in the AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE line in
its configure.ac file.  I figured I'd add that option, run autoreconf,
'make', and see what happened.

What happened was I got errors with the .deps stuff, and while I was
expecting to have to make some changes to the Makefile.am files, this
was not an issue I was expecting to see.

H