bug#13524: Improving user experience for non-recursive builds

[Miles Bader]

%...% seems nice to me.

I don't think "typability" should be a prime factor in deciding,
especially such trivial issues such as shifted-characters (like 75% of
punctuation in Makefiles is shifted on most keyboards); readability is
_much_ more important (and readability in many cases means not too
long, especially for something which is likely to appear multiple
times in file lists etc...).  I don't like the AM_ variants: automake
input files are obviously in the automake language, so it seems silly
and redundant to include "AM_".

Incidentally, given the name, I assume the name "reldir" always refers
to a relative path? What is it relative to again?  If I want to refer
to a source file, do I write "$(srcdir)/%reldir%/filename" (as opposed
to e.g. "$(top_srcdir)/%reldir%/filename")?

... and "canon_reldir" means the same thing, except canonicalized?
[In other words, still always relative, e.g. by converting to an
absolute canonical name using some sort of truename  function, and
then removing the source-directory prefix.]

Thanks,

-miles

--
Cat is power.  Cat is peace.