* Brian Dessent wrote on Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 03:59:19PM CEST:
> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.automake.general/8916/focus=8924>
>
> The MULTITARGETS and foo_{TARGETS,SOURCES,COMMAND} syntax that you came
> up with is certainly in line with the Automake way of doing things, but
> the observation that writing a MULTITARGET rule looks nothing like a
> normal rule is valid I think. And ideally you shouldn't have to worry
> about the stamp or lock names at all, they are implementation details.
Agreed.
> I know this will sound a little crazy, but what about simply an
> AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS/AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE keyword that says "whenever I write a
> rule with more than one target, assume I want the 'one program, multiple
> outputs' semantics and not the traditional make semantics." Automake
> would transparently handle coming up with lock and stamp names and
> adding them to a 'clean' target, as well as emitting all the boring lock
> stuff around the recipe. This is a DWIM kind of idea, since I have the
> sense that people do in fact write such rules with the expectation of
> "one program, multiple outputs" semantics. And it would of course
> default to off so that there's no worry of it regressing anything
> existing; and it can be enabled per-file via AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS.
Do you mean that, given that keyword, all rules of the form
target1 target2 : prereq ...
command ...
should be rewritten to be a multiple-target rule? Ugh. That would
violate the "input appears in output" quite heavily. And be rather
inflexible in that you cannot at the same time have in the same
Makefile.am a rule that is meant to be one separate for each target.
In this case I would prefer inventing a new syntax (like ::: as
suggested by Olly in the other thread), at least that avoids
ambiguities.
More questions, giving the whole thing only a couple minutes thought:
- does this scale? It's not all that useful if Bob has to write one
such rule for each of his set of files: that's exactly what he wanted
to avoid.
- can automake extract all needed information if, say, the targets are
not given literally but as either $(macro) or $(substituted_macro) or
@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
- are we safe on the stamp namespace? Probably yes, we can just use a
counter and an automake-reserved prefix or so.
Cheers,
Ralf
