Re: subdir-objects fails with non-literal _SOURCES

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for the bug report.

* Jim Meyering wrote on Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 06:18:44PM CEST:
> Some automake-generated code malfunctions when using the combination of
> the subdir-objects option and non-literal _SOURCES.

I actually have a patch (about half a year old, see followup to [1])
lying around that invokes `make' to build the depdirs, quite similar to
how you propose; the issue turned out to be much more hackish and
fragile than what you indicate, and IMHO not really applicable.

The strongest argument against invoking `make' at the end of configure
is one of debugging: if your makefile contains a syntax error -- and for
newbies it frequently will -- then configure won't finish successfully.

Note that I had in mind other cleanups of depout.m4, but any changes of
that code are very very fragile.  So, I guess a patch to document the
existing limitation better would be happily accepted.

Cheers,
Ralf

[1] <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.automake.patches/2363>