Re: Creating plain Makefiles with automake

[Russ Allbery]

Marko Kreen <address@hidden> writes:

> Well, user might want few of following features for own rules:
> - out-of-tree builds
> - cross-compilation
> - nice output
> - automatic deps

> otherwise user's own rules don't match Automake's.

> Ofcourse, that means it's up to user to deal with the complexity, but is
> it actually possible to care about "portable make" while doing that?

It's pretty trivial to implement out-of-tree builds with portable user
rules with Automake.  You just use $(srcdir) where appropriate.

Nice output requires more mucking about with Automake-generated
semi-internals than I prefer, so I mostly ignore that part, but I think
for most user-generated rules it's not very important.  The vast majority
of the work is generally done by the auto-generated rules, and if the few
other things are more verbose, oh well.

Most cases where I've seen user rules in play don't involve anything for
which automatic deps are particularly meaningful or important.  Usually
normal make dependencies are sufficient and unexciting.

I can't comment on cross-compilation having never done it myself.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>