Re: lib-src/Makefile.in gets circular dependency due to VPATH

[Richard Stallman]

    When (re)building emacs, GNU make now complains that it is dropping
    circular dependencies on the scripts (rcs2log, etc.).

Aside from that diagnostic, does it do the right thing?
Does it copy rcs2log, etc., into the build dir?
In other words, is this a real problem or just a spurious warning?

    would probably help if srcdir != builddir (so maybe these rules should
    be contionalized on that).

Is there any way to test that condition?
I don't see any macro that could be tested with #ifdef
to detect this case.

    The problem is that there are rules like

      foo: $(srcdir)/foo

    and VPATH contains $(srcdir).

Why does VPATH get into the act?

There is a comment saying that we use $(srcdir) explicitly
so as not to depend on VPATH.  Perhaps we could just delete
the definition of VPATH, and see if any problems pop up.