Re: Manual substitution (was: Default for libexecdir)

[John Burger]

Bill Moseley <address@hidden> writes:

> Well, this is what I'm using in a Makefile.am:
>
> CLEANFILES = swish.cgi
> swish.cgi: swish.cgi.in
>         @rm -f swish.cgi
>         @sed \
>                 -e 's,@@perlmoduledir@@,$(libexecdir)/perl,' \
>                 -e 's,@@swishbindir@@,$(bindir),' \
>                 -e 's,@@perlbinary@@,$(PERL),' \
>                          $(srcdir)/swish.cgi.in > swish.cgi
>
> Is there a better way to do those substitutions?  I can't use @bindir@
> directly as it gets replaced in the Makefile generation, of course.

We don't use automake, but we used to have something like the following 
in our Makefiles:

  SUBSTPAT = $(PERL) -pe 's/@([\w]+)@/$$ENV{$$1} || $$&/ge;'

Then, following your example above, we might have a rule like this:

  %.cgi : #.cgi.in
	PERL=$(PERL) perlmoduledir=$(perlmoduledir) ... $(SUBSTPAT) $< > 
address@hidden
        $(INSTALL_PROGRAM) address@hidden $@
        rm -f address@hidden

where the .in files have @PERL@ etc.

We now have a mkscript perl script that does all of this with some 
other bells and whistles, but it's basically the same as the above.  As 
a geeky aside, my favorite part of our build is the following bootstrap:

  mkscript: mkscript.pl
        PERL=$(PERL) $(PERL) $< < $< > address@hidden
        ...

- John Burger
  MITRE