bug#8360: distcheck-hook never called

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Pitamila,

let's keep the mailing list in Cc:, please.  I would've seen your reply
earlier then.

* address@hidden wrote on Mon, Apr 04, 2011 at 04:02:53PM CEST:
> ----- "Ralf Wildenhues" a écrit :
> > 
> > thanks for the report.
> 
> thanks for the support, I hope my answer is not too late.

There's (almost) never a "too late" when giving useful feedback!

> > * address@hidden wrote on Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 09:17:09AM CEST:
> > > I'd like to make a rpm buildpackage in my distcheck-hook rule.
> > > My 'distcheck-hook' rule in my root Makefile.am is never called.
> > > I tryed to define a 'distcheck-local' too without success.
> > > Is there something more to know than 14.4 of automake manual?
> > 
> > Can you show the Makefile.am file?  distcheck-hook should work.
> 
> Find attached the Makefile.am of my doc/ subdir
> In fact I try to call a clean-local without success (I suppose
> it's the same bug than my distcheck-local not beeing called
> in my top Makefile.am)

Yep.  And you have indeed stumbled over a limitation in automake;
I could call it a bug, but I'm inclined to document it rather than
fix it as it is worked around easily.

Quoting your Makefile.am:

clean-local     :
                -rm -rf html/* html @address@hidden latex/* latex

There is a literal TAB after 'clean-local'.  automake's parser is pretty
dumb when it comes to distinguishing rule commands from rule lines from
variable assignments, mostly because it is hard to get things right when
hard-core GNU make code is used.

Anyway, in this case it gets things wrong due to the TAB.  Solution is
to remove the TAB before the colon, maybe replacing it with a number of
spaces.  Then everything will work out fine.

OK to add you to THANKS for the eventual documentation patch I've yet to
write?

Thanks again for the report,
Ralf