Re: Automake for system libraries

[Ryan Arnold]

On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 23:12 +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Hello Ryan,
> 
> * Ryan Arnold wrote on Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 10:06:20PM CEST:
> > I'm attempting to port a GLIBC add-on I wrote (libdfp) into a standalone
> > library.  My plan is to auto-confiscate the GLIBC-esque Makefiles into
> > Makefile.am's.  This has presented some problems.
> 
> > Moving from GLIBC's very robust and complicated handwritten Makefiles
> > (written by Roland McGrath) to Automake has proven to be conceptually
> > difficult while trying to maintain the sysdeps tree structure.
> 
> Well yes.  Roland wrote GNU make, and glibc probably uses every single
> feature of it.  Automake has little to no knowledge about GNU make-
> specific constructs.
> 
> Can you off-load the sysdeps detection into a couple of configure macros
> and replace the corresponding file names with AC_SUBST substitutions?
> You'd still have to list all possible files in some EXTRA_libdfp_a_SOURCES
> variable somewhere, but at least that would get you going.
> 
> Hope that helps for a start.

Hi Ralf,

I did indeed consider this as an option, but hadn't considered the
EXTRA_libdfp_a_SOURCES, which is a good piece of the puzzle.

I already use configure macros to determine the relevant search path for
each platform-processor-encoding combination.

I guess I'll have to list the target file names (sans suffix) in the
configure fragments as well.  This will require a configure fragment for
each convenience library I suspect.

Ryan S. Arnold
IBM Linux Technology Center
Linux Toolchain Development