Re: make dist improvements

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> * Behdad Esfahbod wrote on Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 11:31:29PM CEST:
>> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
>>> * Behdad Esfahbod wrote on Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 05:40:52PM CEST:
>>>> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
>>>>> my-dist:
>>>>>         env TAR_OPTIONS="--owner=0 --group=0" $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) dist
>>>> Thanks.  Done now.  Would be nice if automake did that already.  Or at 
>>>> least
>>>> just passed TAR_OPTIONS down, as in:
>>>>
>>>> AMTAR = TAROPTIONS="$(TAROPTIONS)" ${SHELL}
>>>> /home/behdad/src/git/fd.o/cairo/build/missing --run tar
>>> Yeah.  I'm considering that for 1.11.  It cannot be in 1.10 because
>>> it would break current setups that have an external script to set
>>> TAR_OPTIONS (note the underscore BTW), or a rule like the my-dist one
>>> above.  Backward compatibility is a fine line.  ;-)
>> It still works with GNU make, right? Cause that automatically defines shell
>> vars as make vars, right?  We do a lot of things like this in cairo:
>>
>> TARGETS = $(CAIRO_TARGETS)
>> TEST_ENVIRONMENT = CAIRO_TARGETS="$(TARGETS)"
>>
>> This way a user can do either of:
>>
>>   CAIRO_TARGETS=whatever make check
>>
>>   make check TARGETS=whatever
> 
> This works even with portable make.  The crucial difference is that you
> use two different names, one for the environment variable and one for
> the make macro.

Right.  So why is:

AMTAR = TAR_OPTIONS="$(TAR_OPTIONS)" ${SHELL}
/home/behdad/src/git/fd.o/cairo/build/missing --run tar

not backward-compatible then?

> Maybe that's what you meant with TAROPTIONS vs. TAR_OPTIONS (except even
> then the AMTAR line would be buggy).  I'd consider that confusing
> though.  ;-)

No.  That part was a typo.

Cheers,
behdad

> Cheers,
> Ralf
>