automake training tutorial: distcheck, separate build directory and generated files

[Michel Briand]

Hi all,

(I've put the tutorial on a small website. So that I can release
easily. http://kheb.homelinux.org/publish/autotraining/ : you'll find
two files, one for a minimal release, another for a normal release).

I've looked at 'make dist' to release the package. So after some
readings I tried 'make distcheck'.

-- 1/

I discovered that, if we build the source in a separate directory, we
need to fix some minor things:

in Makefile.am I used to write:

LIBTRAINING_DIR=../lib
AM_CPPFLAGS = -I$(LIBTRAINING_DIR)
[...]
training_LDADD = ../lib/libtraining.la

Now, thanks to the tries with 'make distcheck', I must be more strict:

LIBTRAINING_SRCDIR=$(top_srcdir)/src/lib
LIBTRAINING_BUILDDIR=$(top_builddir)/src/lib

AM_CPPFLAGS = -I$(LIBTRAINING_SRCDIR)

bin_PROGRAMS = training
training_SOURCES = training.c internal_version.c
training_LDADD = $(LIBTRAINING_BUILDDIR)/libtraining.la

Is there a better way to do that, a libtool trick that I missed for
example ?

-- 2/

I want to create a minimal tar, so I can restart from scratch to test
all autotools stuff... With autogen.sh.

I'm using Subversion. And my top source directory is named
'autotraining'. So I need to do some trick to release a minimal tar:

dist-minimal: clean distclean
        if test -f autotraining-$(PACKAGE_VERSION).tar.gz; then \
                rm -f autotraining-$(PACKAGE_VERSION).tar.gz; fi
        find . -type f -name "*~" -exec rm {} \;
        -rm -rf aclocal.m4 autom4te.cache config config.h.in configure $$(find 
. -type f -name Makefile.in)
        -rm -f src/bin/internal_version.c src/lib/internal_version.c
        cd .. && \
                if test -h autotraining-$(PACKAGE_VERSION); then \
                        rm -f autotraining-$(PACKAGE_VERSION); fi && \
                ln -s autotraining autotraining-$(PACKAGE_VERSION) && \
                tar cfz autotraining-minimal-$(PACKAGE_VERSION).tar.gz \
                        autotraining-$(PACKAGE_VERSION)/* --exclude '.svn'

Is it correct ?

-- 3/

I generate some files during build: src/lib/internal_version.c and
src/bin/internal_version.c.

I want to remove them. So I added those files to the CLEANFILES
variable.

Is this correct ?


Cheers,
Michel