Re: [Automake-NG] Removal of INCLUDES in favour of AM_CPPFLAGS

[Stefano Lattarini]

Hi Peter, Eric, thanks for the feedback and the support.

On 02/02/2013 01:51 AM, Peter Rosin wrote:
> On 2013-02-02 01:15, Eric Blake wrote:
>> On 02/01/2013 05:00 PM, Peter Rosin wrote:
>>> Supporting INCLUDES in automake-NG costs nearly nothing.
>>
>> This, however, is a statement I'm not willing to concede; so while I
>> agree with the decision to deprecate (but not remove) INCLUDES from
>> automake, I think it is fair game to state that someone switching to
>> Automake-NG should be prepared to avoid INCLUDES, as part of that switch.
> 
> Oh. I claim ignorance. I blindly assumed the implementation in -NG
> was just as trivial as in plain old Automake.
>
For now indeed it is, but it might be nice to keep the door open to
future refactorings or even sweeping changes to the implementation
(which has been done heavily for other parts of the codebase, see for
example Texinfo support).

Since you are going to need an audit of your whole build system anyway
if you are planning to switch to Automake-NG, having to get rid of
$(INCLUDES) in the process doesn't add any real burden; OTOH, as you
noted, doing so when merely switching to a new major Automake version
might be a real hassle, since in that case the backward incompatibilities
should be definitely fewer and much smaller, and shouldn't force you to
revisit your whole build system.

And actually, even that wouldn't be a problem if there were only few
usages of $(INCLUDES) left in the wild, but as you noted, it has been
actively deprecated for a too short time, so that most developers might
not even be aware yet of its deprecation.

> When there are technical reasons to drop INCLUDES in Automake-NG,
> it's a totally different situation. I then agree that it's perfectly
> ok to issue a (default visible) deprecation warning in Automake, in
> order to enable an easy upgrade path to -NG in the future.


> I should have known that the removal wasn't as trivially stupid as
> it looked at first sight...
>
Well, it wasn't for Automake-NG, but it has turned out it mostly is
for mainline Automake.

Regards,
  Stefano