Re: Recursive targets for the user

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Stefano Lattarini wrote on Thu, Oct 07, 2010 at 09:27:53PM CEST:
> On Thursday 07 October 2010, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > The *-am naming is unfortunately used by several packages already too
> > (yes, they override e.g., all-am)
> IMVHO, they are blatantly violating automake namespace here, and thus
> should be ready to adapt to changes in automake internals.  We souldn't
> be hold back by such abuses of internal details.
> > and I'm not sure whether I want to break that.
> Well, I'm pretty sure I want ;-)
> 
> What we could do for the sake of backward-compatibility is to keep
> for some time the old `foo-am' and `foo-recursive' targets as "alias"
> to resp. the new `foo-local' and `foo' ones:
>   foo-am: foo-local
>   foo-recursive: foo
> so that packages which used our internals in saner ways could still
> work (for some time).

But using -local for this is pretty inconsistent, too.  foo-local
targets exist to extend foo targets.  The internal foo-am targets are
the nonrecursive part of the foo targets.  They serve different
purposes, and mixing that up is not a good idea.

So no, we shouldn't use -local.  At least not if you want consistency
between user-provided recursive targets and automake-provided ones.

And if we need another suffix anyway, might as well use -am.

> > > Then we could let the user implement his own recursive 
> > > targets in a uniform fashion w.r.t. automake-generated recursive
> > > targets (and thus also still share the rule code text). 
> > Not sure what you mean here.
> I mean that the user-defined recursive targets should be as similar as
> possible to the automake-defined ones in the design, behaviour, and
> implementation, all as transparently to the user as possible.

See above.

Cheers,
Ralf