Re: [PATCH v2 0/9] Patches to avoid use of make recursion in the 'src/' subdir

[Jim Meyering]

Stefano Lattarini wrote:

> On 08/31/2012 09:59 PM, Jim Meyering wrote:
>> Jim Meyering wrote:
>>> Jim Meyering wrote:
>>> ...
>>>> No problem.
>>>> Next step, "make distcheck".  First failure is because inclusion of
>>>> version.h fails in the non-srcdir build:
>>> ...
>>>> This fixes it:
>>>>
>>>> diff --git a/src/local.mk b/src/local.mk
>>>
>>> FYI, here's another make distcheck problem,
>>> in case someone else can get to it before I do
>>> (it'll soon be dinner time here):
>>>
>>>   make[2]: Entering directory 
>>> `/h/j/w/co/cu/coreutils-8.19.68-ea804-dirty/_build'
>>>     CC       src/uname-arch.o
>>>     CC       src/hostname.o
>>>     CCLD     src/arch
>>>     CCLD     src/hostname
>>>     GEN      man/arch.1
>>>     GEN      man/hostname.1
>>>   mkdir: cannot create directory 'man/arch.td': No such file or directory
>>>   make[2]: *** [man/arch.1] Error 1
>>>   make[2]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....
>>>   mkdir: cannot create directory 'man/hostname.td': No such file or 
>>> directory
>>>   make[2]: *** [man/hostname.1] Error 1
>>>   make[2]: Leaving directory 
>>> `/h/j/w/co/cu/coreutils-8.19.68-ea804-dirty/_build'
>>>   make[1]: *** [dist] Error 2
>>>   make[1]: Leaving directory 
>>> `/h/j/w/co/cu/coreutils-8.19.68-ea804-dirty/_build'
>>>   make: *** [distcheck] Error 1
>>
>> The fix for this is to create man and src directories:
>>
>> diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac
>> index 8c41d62..5dc4b0a 100644
>> --- a/configure.ac
>> +++ b/configure.ac
>> @@ -464,6 +464,11 @@ AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION([0.18.1])
>>  # For a test of uniq: it uses the $LOCALE_FR envvar.
>>  gt_LOCALE_FR
>>
>> +# Now that configure no longer creates src/ or man/, create them here.
>> +# Doing it this way is more maintainable that adding to each individual
>> +# Makefile rule that creates a file in one of those sub-directories.
>> +$MKDIR_P man src
>> +
> To be extra-purist, shouldn't this be handled with dirstamp rules in the
> Makefile?  Or maybe, such a purist move could be done at least in the
> Automake-NG based fork of coreutils, where we can use GNU make order-only
> prerequisites, which will DTRT in this context.

I agree that this is debatable.
While converting cppi, my first attempt at addressing this was
to create e.g., src/ via rules in src/local.mk.  While that seemed
like it'd be borderline ok in a project with a single binary, I found
that also having to deal with generated headers made it too invasive.

In a way, putting the list of directories to create in configure.ac
seems appropriate to me, since with cppi, I had just removed
src/Makefile and lib/Makefile from the AC_CONFIG_FILES list
in that same file.

I think you're right that with automake-NG we'll be able to move
each mkdir commands back into its corresponding */local.mk file.
However, if you have something that looks good for automake, please
post a patch.