Re: [AUCTeX] feature request: autogenerate a Makefile?

[Mosè Giordano]

Hi Sivaram,

2016-08-17 6:57 GMT+02:00 Sivaram Neelakantan <address@hidden>:
> Hi,
>
> Would it be possible for an option to generate a Makefile based on the
> local variables that are set for included Tex files?

TeX files don't work well with Makefiles, because of unavoidable
circular dependencies: after the first compilation, auxiliary files
are generated and then used for subsequent compilations, after which
they're always updated.  So the output file depends on the auxiliary
files, which in a sense depend on the output file (they're generated
together).

> Since Auctex
> smartly figures out the compilation sequence, would it be make sense
> to create a Makefile?

AUCTeX doesn't know in advance which commands you need to compile a
document (apart the name of *TeX and bibliography engines), nor how
many times you need to run them: it exploits its ability to parse the
compilation log.  I don't know how we could generate a Makefile out of
a source file, without compiling it first.  In addition, the actual
commands you need to run really depend on the commands you previously
ran.  This is something dynamic, that can't be easily encoded in a
static Makefile.

> when I share my Latex files, I'd like to share a Makefile instead of
> Texing instructions

Unless I want to specify a static chain of commands, I use tools like
"latexmk" in my Makefiles, that dynamically determine the commands to
run by parsing the compilation log, just like AUCTeX.

Bye,
Mosè