bug#12064: distclean failure with Automake 1.12.2

[Peter Johansson]

Hi Stefano,

On 7/27/12 7:08 PM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> severity 12064 minor
> thanks
>
> On 07/27/2012 04:12 AM, Peter Johansson wrote:
> > Hi automakers,
> >
> > I was about to make a release when I discovered that distcheck suddenly didn't 
> > work
> > anymore.  The distclean rule failed with
> >
> > Making distclean in doc
> > make[2]: Entering directory 
> > `/home/peterJo/projects/software/yat-0.8.x/yat-0.8.2/_build/doc'
> > Makefile:498: ../yat/classifier/doxygen.mk: No such file or directory
> > Makefile:499: ../yat/normalizer/doxygen.mk: No such file or directory
> [Aside:
>   This seems quite a complex and brittle occurrence of inter-directory 
> dependencies;
>   have you thought about the possibility of converting to a non-recursive 
> setup?  I
>   have done so with Automake itself (since version 1.12), and have been very, 
> very
>   happy with that move so far.]
Yes, we have converted to non-recursive Makefile in trunk since that 
branch was created, and to get rid of this hack was one the reasons we 
decided to do so.

> > This was for a stable branch release so there had just been minor changes in 
> > two .cc files
> > and no changes at all wrt the build system. After some investigation I found 
> > that Automake
> > 1.12.2 has changed the order directories are traversed for clean rules.
> I thought of this change as a mere cleanup actually, since the previous 
> different
> order of directory traversal for clean rules was basically a relic needed by the
> older (and now long-dead) implementation of automatic dependency tracking:
> <http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/history/automake-history.html#First-Take-on-Dependencies>
>
> > I must say I find
> > it unexpected that behaviour like this is changed between 1.12.1 and 1.12.2. I 
> > thought this
> > kind of changes were only introduced when bumping versions from say 1.11 to 
> > 1.12 and not
> > between stable releases.
> >
> > The reason I got the failure is that files doxygen.mk are included into 
> > doc/Makefile.
> > These files are generated in the corresponding Makefile and listed under 
> > DISTCLEANFILES
> > so they are deleted during 'make distclean'. As SUBDIRS in top Makefile.am is
> > "SUBDIRS = doc yat" that was not a problem before since doc was entered first 
> > during
> > cleaning and doc/Makefile was already gone when the doxygen.mk files were 
> > removed.
> >
> > Perhaps a strange use case, but still I wanted to report it.
> And you did well; perhaps this this worth some documentation addition?
> Not sure.  Anyway, a good reason to keep the bug report open for now.
Well, I found it easily in NEWS. When I read the NEWS in your release 
announcement I couldn't connect the dots that this would bite. I guess 
that's the nature of hacks.
> > I think I've found a workaround
> Curios: which workaround?
I moved the removal of doxygen.mk to doc/Makefile

http://dev.thep.lu.se/yat/changeset/2794

Cheers,
Peter