Re: nobase_ room for improvement

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Rob" == Robert Collins <address@hidden> writes:

Rob> Installation of headers in subdirectories is more complex than it
Rob> could be (IMO).

Thanks for this info.

Rob> The nobase_ prefix allows utilising an existing directory tree,
Rob> but a non-recursive build will almost always have a directory or
Rob> two below the Makefile that aren't desired on install.

Rob> While defining a new target to be $(includedir)/foo lets you work
Rob> around this, it would be great to do something like:
Rob> nobase_preserve_foo_HEADERS = ...

I have some questions about this.  What if `foo' appears twice in the
directory name?  What if `foo' doesn't appear?  Is this the most
useful way to handle this feature or is there another way?  In any
case something along these lines does make sense.  The question (for
me anyway) is specifying it properly.


On a somewhat related (?) note, I've occasionally seen bug reports
where people would like to specify the name of a program or library
dynamically.  Or, they'd like to build a program with a name automake
already uses (how do you build a program named "install"?).

I've been thinking of adding a _NAME macro that would let you do
this.  For instance:

    bin_PROGRAMS = my-install

    my_install_SOURCES = ...
    my_install_NAME = install

In the build tree we would build `my-install', but at install time we
would run the _NAME through the program transform and then install the
program under the resulting name.

We would do this for programs.  It would be nice to do it for
libraries (it has come up more than once) but it means problems if
programs are linked against them in the build tree.  Maybe we could
implement it by building the library under the real name and having
the _NAME name be just a stamp-like file.

Any comments on this?

Tom