Re: variables in _SOURCES

[Mathieu Lirzin]

Hello,

Daniel Pocock <address@hidden> writes:

> According to the "Warning" in this page[1], it is not permitted to use
> variables in _SOURCES.  Is this deliberate or is it a bug?
>
> In our project, we started getting the warnings about subdir-objects and
> so we added[2]
>
>   AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([foreign subdir-objects])
>
> However, since that time the build has been failing[3] and it appears to
> be because one module[4] is using a variable in _SOURCES
>
> The $PYCXX_SRCDIR variable is used to refer to the sources provided by
> the PyCXX[5] library.  PyCXX is not distributed as a compiled library
> that can be linked against, the sources are simply placed under
> /usr/share by the packages (e.g. on Debian[6]) and users have to compile
> them into their projects by referring to them from their Makefile.
>
> What is the recommended way of using such sources in a build?  I could
> write some Makefile rule to copy or symlink the sources in to the tree,
> but is there an official way to solve this with autotools?

The idiomatic way is to distribute every source files that could be
built.  One way to achieve that would be to make a 'bootstrap' script
that fetches PyCXX sources before doing ‘autoreconf -vfi’.

-- 
Mathieu Lirzin