Somebody suggested to me (was that you, Ludo?) that Automake should really allow the user to easily add recursive targets.
This is fairly trivial to implement, the biggest complication is name calling. So, here's the deal: currently, Automake has RECURSIVE_TARGETS RECURSIVE_CLEAN_TARGETS AM_RECURSIVE_TARGETS where the last is the union of the first and then some more, none of them are public interfaces, but at least the latter is used by, e.g., coreutils, to prevent invoking more than one of the recursive targets at once with parallel make. Lastly, the deal is that each $target requires a non-pubic $target-am rule to actually do the work for the directory. We cannot easily have Automake-defined variables to which the users add to (with +=), so let's have two sets of variables. Questions: 1) What to name them? RECURSIVE_USER_TARGETS RECURSIVE_USER_CLEAN_TARGETS ALL_RECURSIVE_USER_TARGETS or have the USER_ before RECURSIVE_? 2) Whether to rename the above and reuse the names for the user (cleaner interface but backward incompatible)? So the internal one's would be, say, am_RECURSIVE_TARGETS am_RECURSIVE_CLEAN_TARGETS am_ALL_RECURSIVE_TARGETS 3) Whether to document the s/$/-am/ rule for the per-directory target so it then also holds for user-provided recursive rules. (If yes, then we could share the rule code text between both.) Comments? Thanks, Ralf
