Re: TODO

[Ralf Wildenhues]

[ slightly reformatted ]

* Bob Friesenhahn wrote on Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 08:31:15PM CET:
> On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Noah Misch wrote:
> >On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 12:28:24PM -0600, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> >>The problem is that Automake does *not* know the dependency graph of
> >>each object.  Within one Makefile, this is possible (and mostly
> >>supported) but most projects depend on SUBDIRS to recurse though
> >>subordinate Makefiles so there is no full dependency graph of each
> >>object.  The build is dependent on careful ordering by the developer
> >>rather than Makefile dependencies.
> >
> >Thanks for the correction.
> >
> >If Automake descends into SUBDIRS to install in the same order it
> >does to build and uses `make' dependencies to ensure proper ordering
> >within each SUBDIR, then the products should relink/install in the
> >correct order.  Right?
> 
> That would be my assumption as well.  The current library install 
> mechanism does not ensure that libraries are installed in the same 
> order that they are built.

This statement seems to me to imply that Automake should be able to do
the job on its own, without any additional information from libtool,
given the library dependencies are stated correctly in the
Makefile.am's.

So, can the user not enforce inter-Makefile dependencies through the use
of `libfoo_la_DEPENDENCIES = sub/libbar.la' ?

> A problem exists in that if a library is already installed on 
> the system, it may be used by accident, either at build time, or at 
> install time.  This masks serious build/install ordering issues.

Yes.

> Package developers usually already have the library installed on the 
> system so they may not see the failure in their environment, but 
> end-users do.  'make distcheck' helps significantly with discovering 
> these problems.

BTW, this topic shouldn't have any extra issues in the cases of staged
installs (checked by `make distcheck') and cross-compilation, right?

Regards,
Ralf