Re: EXTRA_DIST respects Automake conditionals?

[John Calcote]

Hi Ben,

The reason this works is because of the way AM Conditionals are 
implemented. If a conditional is true, then all contained statements are 
in effect. Otherwise, all contained conditions are commented out in the 
resulting makefile.

Regards,
John

On 7/29/2009 8:57 PM, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> I was surprised today to discover that EXTRA_DIST respects
> Automake conditionals.
>
> In other words, if I have the following Makefile.am:
>
>      AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS = foreign
>
>      EXTRA_DIST =
>
>      if COND
>      bin_PROGRAMS = foo
>      foo_SOURCES = foo.c
>      EXTRA_DIST += EXTRA
>      endif
>
> and configure.ac:
>
>      AC_INIT([mumble], [1.0])
>      AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR([foo.c])
>      AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile])
>      AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
>      AC_PROG_CC
>      AM_CONDITIONAL([COND], [false])
>      AC_OUTPUT
>
> then "make dist" will not put EXTRA into the generated tarball.
> It will put foo.c into the tarball, though.
>
> Is there an appropriate target to put files that should always be
> distributed, regardless of conditionals?  noinst_HEADERS works,
> but to me it feels like abuse to use it for this purpose.
>
> For what it's worth, in the actual project where I encountered
> this, the usage is more like this:
>
>      if ENABLE_USERSPACE
>      ...
>      include lib/automake.mk
>      include ofproto/automake.mk
>      include utilities/automake.mk
>      include tests/automake.mk
>      include include/automake.mk
>      include third-party/automake.mk
>      include debian/automake.mk
>      include vswitchd/automake.mk
>      include xenserver/automake.mk
>      if HAVE_CURSES
>      if HAVE_PCRE
>      include extras/ezio/automake.mk
>      endif
>      endif
>      endif
>
> In other words, I'm using a conditional to disable a great many
> features, and it's convenient not to push that conditional down
> into all the included files.
>
> Here's the Makefile.am in question:
> http://openvswitch.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=openvswitch;a=blob;f=Makefile.am;h=dccb8cfdf92a3dd4dc9f3276e7533f68769587f8;hb=c2b070214097fa40dc78252882d96babe7fab4b4
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ben.
>