Re: [revised patch 1/1] support AC_SUBST'able automake rules

[Michael Bletzinger]

Tom Tromey wrote:
> 
> >>>>> "Lars" == Lars J Aas <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> Lars> I believe everything should be in order (I believe I filled out
> Lars> for Automake and maybe even Libtool when I did it for Autoconf).
> 
> Yeah, I found the info.
> 
> Lars> Anyways, the patch should be reworked to use a &canonicalize()
> Lars> sub as Akim suggested
> 
> I agree.
> 
> Lars> What I'm really wondering about is whether you accept the
> Lars> semantics of the patch; allowing AC_SUBSTS in for instance
> Lars> library names...
> 
> I understand the need to be able to rename programs and libraries.
> I've had other requests for that.
> 
> So the question is whether this is how we want to do it.
> 
> What are other ways?  One other way would be to support the name as an
> attribute of the object:
> 
>     bin_PROGRAMS = foo
> 
>     foo_SOURCES = ...
>     foo_NAME = @what-foo-really-is@
> 
> Is this more confusing?  Or less?
> 
> Over time I've come to dislike arbitrary @FOO@ substitutions, because
> they limit the amount of knowledge automake has about what is going
> on.  In this case it might not be so bad.
> 
> Tom


The thing is, that since every AC_SUBST'd variable is transformed into a
make variable, you can already specify all sorts of derived stuff using
make variables in Makefile.am's with the CVS automake. For example:

in the configure.in

AC_SUBST(arch)
AC_SUBST(nonthreaded)
AC_SUBST(nonthreaded_sources)


and in the Makefile.am

foo_SOURCES = foo.c fee_$(arch).c

lib_LTLIBRARIES = libfoo_$(nonthreaded).la

libfoo___nonthreaded__la_SOURCES = foo.c $(nonthreaded_sources)

EXT_DIST = $(threaded_sources)

So I'm not sure that doing autoconf substitution really adds anything.  
I took a stab at updating the documentation to explain this concept and
its limitation but I'm having trouble figuring out the meaning of the
texinfo tags.
        

        Michael

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Michael Bletzinger      Software Developer, Alliance Computational
address@hidden  Environment & Security
217 265 5137            NCSA