Re: [GSoC] Proposal for "Parse Makefile.am using an AST"

[Mathieu Lirzin]

John Calcote <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Matthias,
>
> If you have any suggestions on documents I can read or software I can check
>> to
>> prepare for this project I'll be glad to check them. I know texinfo is
>> written
>> in Perl and generates an AST so I'll check that.
>>
>
> A Makefile.am file is really just a Makefile with embellishments. It seems
> like your ast would have to incorporate most of make’s syntax to work
> correctly.
>
> The reason Perl was chosen to begin with is because of its great text
> processing capabilities as, ultimately, all automake really does is copy
> the file directly to the output Makefile.in file, filtering out automake
> stuff along the way and injecting make snippets generated from the automake
> constructs.
>
> This may not appear obvious at first because many simpler Makefile.am files
> contain only automake stuff. But anything found in the Makefile.am file
> that automake doesn’t recognize is assumed to be proper make script and
> copied directly to the output file.
>
> I suggest making your ast handle non automake chunks as a specific token
> type designed to be passed through without modifications.

I agree that using a coarse grained AST is a good first approach.
Exploration and evaluation of a finer grained approach later during this
GSoC could be interesting too.

Thanks for your input.

-- 
Mathieu Lirzin
GPG: F2A3 8D7E EB2B 6640 5761  070D 0ADE E100 9460 4D37