Re: Should gnulib lib_SOURCES contain .h files? also, splitting up ftoastr

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Paul,

> Emacs needs the dtoastr function, but not ftoastr or ldtoastr.
> To save build time, it'd be nice if it could build just dtoastr.
> The easiest way I can think of to do that is to split up the
> existing ftoastr module (which supports all three functions)
> into three modules: ftoastr, dtoastr, ldtoastr, one for
> each function.

Yes, that's the most sensible way to do it.

When you do this, the files lib/ftoastr.h, lib/ftoastr.c, and m4/c-strtod.m4
would be listed as part of each of the 3 modules. Whereas lib_SOURCES would
contain just one file in each case:
  lib_SOURCES += ftoastr.c          for module ftoastr
  lib_SOURCES += dtoastr.c          for module dtoastr
  lib_SOURCES += ldtoastr.c         for module ldtoastr

> While looking into this I noticed that ftoastr, like some
> but not all other modules, puts a .h file into lib_SOURCES:
> 
> lib_SOURCES += ftoastr.h ftoastr.c dtoastr.c ldtoastr.c

You can list or omit .h files in lib_SOURCES; it has no effect.
That's because Automake knows that .h files cannot be compiled
to object files.

> I see that other modules are inconsistent in this area.

Yes, but it's not worth spending time on fixing this inconsistency.

Bruno