Re: $(srcdir) in man pages and other targets

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 11/24/2012 01:07 PM, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 12:12:03PM +0100, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
>>>
>> I believe that, if you distribute a file, creating in $(srcdir) might
>> actually be the correct choice ...  For more background, see:
>>
>>   <http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=10852>
> 
> I didn't really found a clear explanation of that in this url, but it
> may be because I am dense ;).
>
Oops, that's because that bug is about generated *sources*, not
man pages or info pages.  The issues explored there are not really
relevant to the the present discussion.  Sorry for the confusion.

> However for the specific case of the man pages generated in Texinfo, I
> think that not doing them in srcdir is better.
>
This is quite reasonable.  The only issue with that is that FreeBSD make
will then try to regenerated the manpages unconditionally in VPATH builds,
even when building from distributed tarballs; see also the related issue:

  <http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=7884>

Not a big deal IMHO: you could just suggest to use GNU make for VPATH
builds (that is the safest bet regardless).

>>> It may not be wrong in every cases, for instance it seems to me that it 
>>> makes sense to rebuild in $(srcdir) the Makefile fragments that are 
>>> included by automake.
>>>
>> In that case, it is the *only* sane approach actually.  Automake (and
>> the other autotools, like aclocal and autoconf) are re-run by the
>> automatic remake rules present in automake-generated Makefiles only
>> from the srcdir (since they can only work from there), so any included
>> file that is in the builddir would not be found.
> 
> Ok, that's also what I figured out.  Thanks.
> 

Regards, and HTH,
  Stefano