turning off dependency tracking when building fat binaries on Mac OSX

[Peter Johansson]

 Hello,

The `INSTALL' file provided by autotools has the following blurp

>    On MacOS X 10.5 and later systems, you can create libraries and
> executables that work on multiple system types--known as "fat" or
> "universal" binaries--by specifying multiple `-arch' options to the
> compiler but only a single `-arch' option to the preprocessor.  Like
> this:
>
>      ./configure CC="gcc -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc -arch ppc64" \
>                  CXX="g++ -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc -arch ppc64" \
>                  CPP="gcc -E" CXXCPP="g++ -E"
I noticed that when configuring like that automake automagically turns 
off dependency-tracking, for good reasons.

However, it is not uncommon that people instead issue

./configure CFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc -arch ppc64" \
CXXFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc -arch ppc64" \
LDFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc -arch ppc64"

which will not works. See for example

http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg03121.html

You need to explicitly turn off dependency tracking. My question is 
simply is there a good reason why automake does not turn off the 
dependency tracking automagically in this case, or should I consider it 
a missing feature.

Cheers,
Peter