Re: minor gettext nits

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Bruno Haible wrote on Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 02:49:33PM CEST:
> Indeed I prefer to not use undocumented symbols from automake. I think this
> level of detail is beyond what automake should document: $(am__dirstamp) is
> an artifact of the _current_ output generated by automake and could change
> in future versions. Also, automake documents one way to reliably create
> directories; it does not need a second one. I'm applying this.

Thanks.

> --- modules/libxml    26 Oct 2007 09:32:36 -0000      1.8
> +++ modules/libxml    14 Sep 2008 12:44:13 -0000
> @@ -164,329 +164,329 @@
>  BUILT_SOURCES += $(LIBXML_H)
>  
>  libxml/DOCBparser.h: libxml/DOCBparser.in.h
> -     test -d libxml || mkdir libxml
> +     test -d libxml || $(mkdir_p) libxml

This has the very slight disadvantage of forking 50 extra shell
processes when the build tree is used for the first time.  You
could instead have your own directory stamp:

libxml/dirstamp:
        $(mkdir_p) libxml

and have the header rules depend on it, to avoid those processes.
For what little it's worth, at least for GNU make and GNU coreutils
mkdir, omitting `test -d libxml ||' is probably more efficient, too,
as it allows 'make' to omit executing a shell for the command line.

(I think you're probably aware of both of these nits, and have made a
conscious choice, which is fine; I mention this just for completeness.)

Cheers,
Ralf