Re: relocatable-lib and "make distcheck"

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Reuben,

> When I use relocatable-lib it adds a line like this to Makefile in src/:
> 
> include ../lib/$(DEPDIR)/relocatable.Plo
> 
> In my top-level Makefile.am, I have "lib" (containing gnulib) before "src",
> which is necessary, because the programs in src link against libgnu.la.
> 
> When I run "make distcheck", "make distclean" is run first in lib/. Then
> when it is run in src/ I get an error because reloctable.Plo no longer
> exists.

1)
When I use GNU hello, I cannot reproduce it, because it has only 1 Makefile.am.

When I use GNU gettext, the gettext-tools/gnulib-tests/ directory also refers
to a .la file in a sibling directory (../gnulib-lib/libgettextlib.la), but
the generated Makefile contains 'include' statements only for directories in
the current directory.

So, I cannot reproduce. => Next time, please tell how to reproduce it.

2) When I look at the generated Makefile, I see this snippet:

        case "$@" in \
          distclean-* | maintainer-clean-*) list='$(DIST_SUBDIRS)' ;; \
          *) list='$(SUBDIRS)' ;; \
        esac; \
        for subdir in $$list; do \

Have you tried to define the DIST_SUBDIRS variable in Makefile.am [1], listing 
the
subdirectories in reverse order?

Bruno

[1] 
https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/SUBDIRS-vs-DIST_005fSUBDIRS.html