Re: Questions on 'make dist'

[Stepan Kasal]

Good afternon Della,

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 02:02:17PM -0400, NightStrike wrote:
> > On Tue, 11 Mar 2008, NightStrike wrote:
> > > I had intended to do everything with non-recursive make, but as [Ralf]
> > > pointed out once, non-recursive is also considered harmful.
[thread:]
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2007-11/msg00049.html

well, my interpretation of what Ralf said is that it's not healthy to
obey the non-recursive-make rule too rigidly.
I agree with that, though we might disagree in certain cases.

In particular, it's useful to put certain libraries to a common
subdirectory, _just because_ it allows you to use a different
AM_CFLAGS in the Makefile.am there.  The readability achieved from
this hack may overweight the breaking of the rule.

Back to the problem which started this thread:
/trunk/
/trunk/mingw-w64-crt/
/trunk/mingw-w64-doc/
/trunk/mingw-w64-headers/

I guess you should have configure.ac at the top level (trunk).
Then the top-level Makefile would contain
        SUBDIRS = mingw-w64-crt mingw-w64-doc mingw-w64-headers
and the mingw-w64-crt/Makefile.am would perhaps also contain SUBDIRS,
just for the purpose of the hack with local AM_CFLAGS.

It's good to have as few makefiles as possible, it is important to
remember that one makefile should _normally_ cover the whole subtree,
but it's good to use SUBDIRS whenever it helps.

BTW: Why do you insist on the layout described above?  I would have
one top-level directory and make "doc" and "headers" (or perhaps
"hdr") subdirs.
These subdirectories wouldn't need its own makefiles, as it is not
too obtrusive to repeat the short directory name:

dist_doc_DATA = doc/manual.txt
include_HEADERS = \
        hdr/mingw-one.h \
        hdr/mingw-two.h \
        hdr/etc.h

Hope this helps you to find the right mix for your project,
        Stepan