Re: build broken after adding ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I m4

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Peter,

thanks for the bug report.

* Peter Johansson wrote on Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 05:39:52PM CET:
> After modifying my configure.ac and Makefile.am in my project a simple  
> `make' did not work, but I had to run autoreconf in order to get it  
> working again. Would it be possible to modify the rules generated by  
> Automake to avoid this to happen?
[...]

> Makefile.am:
> +ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I m4 --install
> bin_PROGRAMS = foo
>
> If I now call `make', I'll get:
>
> cd . && /bin/sh /home/peter/projects/foo/autotools/missing --run  
> aclocal-1.10
[...]
> The problem seems to be that aclocal is run without flags `-I m4  
> --install'. I guess these flags are not picked up until automake is run  
> at next step.

Exactly.

> It would be great if Automake could take care of this case, because it  
> is always a bit annoying to be forced to email co-developers saying:  
> "you need to run autoreconf".

Yes, unfortunately they have to run autoreconf once.

But this typically is a change that project do very rarely, typically
only once when the build infrastructure is created.  Fixing this bug
OTOH would be quite cumbersome: the rule to run aclocal would need to
look into Makefile.am for possible changes and parse them.  Whereas now,
the make variable is simply used.

Sorry, but I don't really see that the additional work is worth the
hassle in this case.  If somebody sees a really simple fix, then I
might consider it.

Cheers,
Ralf