bug#13928: The 'subdir-object' option breaks makefiles where foo_SOURCES contains $(var)

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 01/02/2015 02:16 AM, Harlan Stenn wrote:
> Excellent timing, thanks!
>
> Now that ntp-4.2.8 is settling down, I'm looking to update our
> Makefile.am's to use subdir-objects, and it's not being fun.
(An aside: I see that ntp still uses a recursive Makefile setup.
Given that you are about to mess with the ntp build system anyway,
have you thought about trying to convert it to a non-recursive
make setup?  That is the suggested way to go nowadays...)

> I may wait until 1.15 is released to continue this effort.
Well, actually, Automake 1.15 is already tagged in the Git repository
and ready to be released (as soon as my new GPG key, replacing the one
that expired 2 months ago, will be accepted by address@hidden).
So this patch will not be available before Automake 1.16.  But then
again, I believe the fix for this bug alone would be enough to
justify a new minor Automake release, so don't worry, this fix will
go in some release soon enough :-)

Also, more importantly, notice that this patch do not yet solve the
issue of '.deps' directories and object files being created in the
source directory (rather than in the build directory) for source
files that contains an explicit reference to $(srcdir), when the
'subdir-object' option is enabled; see the still XFAIL'ing test
't/subobj-vpath-pr13928.sh'.

This issue should *hopefully* be easy to fix, especially with the
new dependency-bootstrapping logic; and I will try hard to make
that happen before the 1.16 release.

Thanks,
  Stefano