Re: Appending to builtin Automake variables from an included file

[Allan Caffee]

On Thu, 26 Feb 2009, Jeroen N. Witmond [Bahco] wrote:
> I'm not an expert on automake, but perhaps you've chosen the wrong
> solution to your problem: maintainer-cleaning some additional files. I
> would have thought target maintainer-clean-local was invented for this
> purpose! :) (However, I have never needed to use it.)
> 
> See for instance
> http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Clean.html#index-maintainer_002dclean_002dlocal-751

Well yes.  The maintainer-clean-local hook would allow an included
snippet to delete some files but that would prevent the main Makefile.am
from being able to define a maintainer-clean-local target.  I was hoping
for something that, if used in an Automake snippet provided by a third
party, would not interfere with the developer at all.  For example a
macro in the Autoconf archive that generates Automake code.
Unfortunatly I don't think anything quite like this exists in Automake
atm. :(  How difficult would it be to allow third parties to hook into
special Automake targets like the *-local targets?  For example a macro
could provide a rule like:

maintainer-clean-macro-hook:
        -rm -rf $(DOXYGEN_HTML_DIR)

And Automake would graciously add that (and any other rules with the
same target name) as prerequisites to maintainer-clean.  What do you
guys think?

~Allan