John Calcote <john.calc...@gmail.com> writes: > A Makefile.am file is really just a Makefile with embellishments. It seems > like your ast would have to incorporate most of make’s syntax to work > correctly. > > The reason Perl was chosen to begin with is because of its great text > processing capabilities as, ultimately, all automake really does is copy > the file directly to the output Makefile.in file, filtering out automake > stuff along the way and injecting make snippets generated from the automake > constructs. > > This may not appear obvious at first because many simpler Makefile.am files > contain only automake stuff. But anything found in the Makefile.am file > that automake doesn’t recognize is assumed to be proper make script and > copied directly to the output file.
This is what I figured from the doc. To be honest I've really only used automake as a "user" and have never written a Makefile.am myself. But I figured that from the "General Operation" subsection of the documentation and from the chat I had with Mathieu. > I suggest making your ast handle non automake chunks as a specific token > type designed to be passed through without modifications. As you said automake assumes what it doesn't recognize is proper make script I think this would be a reasonable approach. Letting make handle make stuff sounds good to me. Thanks for the pointers. -- Matthias Paulmier
