Re: SUBDIRs and slashes

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 09:47, Joerg Faschingbauer wrote:
> >>>>> "adl" == Alexandre Duret-Lutz <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> >>>> "Marty" == Marty Leisner <address@hidden> writes:
> adl> [...]
> 
> Marty> common/Makefile.am:1: directory should not contain `/'
> 
> Marty> Just wondering for some thoughts on this matter...is
> Marty> there any reason to insist on single level source
> Marty> directories in recursive make...
> 
> adl> I can't think of any.
> 
> About two years ago I asked the same question. Lars J. Aas replied
> that "make dist" does not support this.
IIRC, the only reason why make dist has problems with it, is it using
"mkdir" somewhere. I guess, replacing it with mkinstalldirs, mkdir_p or
what ever the current status prefers would help.

>  The documentation (release
> 1.7.9) still says that SUBDIRS can only contain direct descendants of
> the current directory (section "Recursing subdirectories").
AFAICT, current automake doesn't support '/' in subdirs.

> I maintain a build tool (1) that determines the build order of
> subdirectories automatically, in arbitary depths. The SUBDIRS variable
> in the generated toplevel Makefile.am is full of slashes then, but I
> never noticed any automake failure. Only the warning, which is why the
> Confix documentation recommends using a flat hierarchy.
> 
> Any opinions?
I think, you'll see this issue if you skip a Makefile in your hierarchy,
for example if trying to use source tree similar to this:

configure.ac
Makefile.am
subdir1/subdir2/configure.ac
subdir2/subdir2/Makefile.am

With Makefile.am containing SUBDIRS = subdir1/subdir2
and configure.ac containing AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS(subdir1/subdir2)

[I haven't checked the latest automake/autoconf but I recall having
encountered this issue with autoconf-2.57/automake-1.7.2]

Ralf