Thank you both for your speedy responses. On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Jan Engelhardt <jeng...@medozas.de> wrote: > In one project I use -- though not a "header + main makefile" but > a "main makefile + subordinates" layout --: > > # Makefile.am (http://tinyurl.com/dhxfwf) > bin_PROGRAMS = > include bar/Automakefile > include foo/Automakefile > > # bar/Automakefile > bin_PROGRAMS += bar > > # foo/Automakefile > bin_PROGRAMS += foo > > that is, setting all variables ever used to "" before appending to them.
That is certainly one possibility. Unfortunately though that means that in the Makefile.am files you _must_ use += since Automake will error out if you assign more than one value to a variable (within the same Automake conditional block). But I was hoping for away that wouldn't require the author of Makefile.am to change their syntax. I want to "sneak" some additional files onto the clean list. Hopes and dreams aside that is much cleaner for the case I provided. I think I'll use this instead if I can't turn up a more encapsulated approach. Thanks! On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Bob Friesenhahn <bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote: > Modern automake supports += syntax. Modern Automake does support appending. But only appending to a variable that has already been set. My understanding is that Automake handles appending in a way very similar to that shown above, using temp variables which depending on the Automake conditionals defined, may or may not be empty. This allows it to sidestep implementations of Make which don't allow +=. Perhaps we could just drop the error about appending to an undefined variable and treat it as setting the variable if not already set. I don't know how this would effect the reporting of "multiply defined" variables though. The real reason I think it would be nice to have this flexibility is for macro authors to be able to add files to be cleaned up/distributed without requiring the users to manually add anything to their setup. So assuming anything I just said was actually correct, how difficult would it be to safely allow this? ~Allan
