Need help with cleaning up a working GNU Autotools setup 5060

A minimal amount. Thinking about it I think the root problem is maybe that you don't know how to write makefiles and that you are therefore wanting to use autotools to write your makefiles for you.

That would explain a possible fear element in your behaviour that I suspect exists and is partly responsible for what looks like irrationality from here.

Autotools don't write makefiles FOR you, they HELP you write a makefile.

Aha. That's the problem too. One doesn't "start with autotools". One starts with a makefile set, and considers how to abstract out of it or improve it with factors that could better be put into it in a more general way by autotools.

You think! I still don't know what you want because you say you don't want to compile outside the source hirearchy yet every example you give of what you want to do is compile outside the source hierarchy.

Anyway, the gnu people have never managed to say anything clearly, about autotools or anything else! So I doubt your statement. If they were so clear you would be busy gaining an awful lot from "info autconf"! (that's all I've ever bothered reading, and it contains everything I have needed to know so far).

Sure!

If you want to compile outside of the source tree, VPATH must be used because "that's what it's for". It tells make where to look for the source files, because they're not going to be in the compile directory! By definition.

So what is this "situation"?

Thanks, but the only paper I know concerning make is something like "recursive make considered dangerous", with which I agree completely.

However, you may or may not be requiring a recursive make! It's not been possible to tell from your description thus far. Your fears about not being able to make clean seem to express a desire to do a recursive make clean. There is of course nothing stopping you doing a simple find . -type d -exec make clean; from the top!

And what is this problem? You haven't managed to say!

As I said - you aren't clear, and they never are clear.

That IS the standard solution, at least as far as the use of VPATH goes. An alternative to using a single top level Makefile is to build a makefile in each build subdir using autoconf. That's fine, but it's nothing to do with the methodology itself - simply your choice.

You can also populate the build dir with sources if you wish! But if you don't, then either you use VPATH or you explicitly calculate a full path for each source.

You can also do the make in the source directory and redirect the object files (again, that's trivial). But that's messy and means that you have to sit there and do a full make, then move or copy the results, or be careful with the library builds in terms of pointing them to the right places both for input and output. Not good. Experience says this is a nono. Make is intended to build in the directory it is IN. It's object oriented, in that sense.

It isn't.

This is simply a Makefile. There is nothing (except possibly reserved variables names) in there that makes it a makefile.am. Makefile.am will have special make-illegal variables in it that are subsbreastuted in order to (eventually) get a Makefile. Those variables have the form

topbuilddir = .. VPATH = $(srcdir)

and the configure run produces the real makefile. That's the whole point! If you don't do that, you are not using the capabilities appropriately.

It's not "unnecessary", it is correct. You can create it using some autotools constructs (for example by designating the subdirs via an ls in the configure run, and exporting the SUBDIRS variable) but it is what will be there!

You seem to have less concept that you are programming than is useful to maintain ths cnversation. I repeat - autotools HELP you build makefiles. They do not obviate the need for you to build a makefile.

That any Makefile is also a Makefile.am is pointless to mention, but your example contains nothing syntactically that marks it as Makefile.am rather than a Makefile (except possibly reserved make variable names - I don't know if they are reserved or not). Try it - you will find that make is happy with it as a makefile! Real Makefile.am contain are filled in and converted to proper makefile constructs by the .-configure run.

It's plain correct, and perfectly normal, and a one liner!

Since it's evident that you are busy fantasizing away, I leave it to your imagination to proceed.

Peter1