Autoconf and Doxygen

[Christopher Key]

Hello,

I've a package for which I'd like to include some Doxygen created 
documentation in the distributed tarball.  I'm having some problems, I 
think fundamentally because the way the documentation gets built doesn't 
fit very well with the src and build tree ideas.

Things all seem pretty straighforward when one is dealing with items 
that get built on the target system, e.g. c sources producing an 
executable binary.  When I run 'make dist' the source code for the 
object gets included in the distributed tarball.  This is then unzipped 
into one location on the target machine (i.e. the source tree), compiled 
into a mirror 'build' tree, and the objects are all installed from the 
build tree.

However, documentation is a little bit different.  Take the following 
scenario.

In a fresh checkout from the source repository:

./autogen.sh (runs autoreconf ...)
mkdir bld && cd bld
../configure
make dist

Here, the documentation will have been built in the bld directory, and 
if I run 'make install', it needs to know to install it from here

However, if a user acquires the package tarball:

tar -xvzf package.tar.gz
cd package
mkdir bld && cd bld
../configure
make

In this case, the documentation is still in the source tree, and 'make 
install' needs to know to install it from there instead.



Now, the best solution that I've come up with is to say that any 
suitable 'make' command should always result in the documentation ending 
up in the build tree.  I think that the required logic is as follows:

If source tree differs from build tree
   If documentation not present / out of date
      If documentation exists in source tree
         Copy documentation from source tree
      End If
   End If
End If

If documentation (still) out of date
   If doxygen present on host
      Build documentation into build tree
   Else
      Remove documenation and replace with stub (don't want out of date 
information)
   End If
End If

I think the above covers most cases, but I'm really sure, and I've very 
little idea how to implement it.

Can anyone tell me how data objects are meant to be treated with 
autoconf / automake, which trees they're meant to exist in at which 
points, and so on.  Is there a recommended way of doing what I want to 
achieve?

Regards,

Chris