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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    automake sucks!?
From:       Oswald Buddenhagen <ob6 () inf ! tu-dresden ! de>
Date:       2001-04-29 13:40:01
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hi there,

i've heard several people on these lists complaining about automake.
indeed, it is a bit unflexible and makes the am_edit hack necessary.
also, the cvs build requires re-building all the Makefile.in's ...

so here is an alternative idea. i've seen this in many projects, namely
wine (which is rather big, i would say).
there is ONE central rule file (usually something like Rules.mak) in 
the build root. this file is included by all Makefile.in's (which are
now written by hand and are quite small).

considerations:
- definitely no more automake conditionals, but a) they are deprecated
  ATM anyway and b) no-one needs them (substitute conditional targets
  with @target@ and AC_SUBST them) :)
- we still need a (reduced) am_edit, unless METASOURCES = AUTO would
  be handled at build-time (*grmpf*). hmm ... i don't like this
  AUTO anyway. :)
- it would be a lot of work to do the transition. a (clever) script could 
  probably do most of it.
+ we could have native kde<something>_DATA without always having to
  define kde<something>dir along with it. same for KDE_ICON.
+ some of the install targets (namely config files) could be
  optionally made conditional without additional magic. (i know - this is
  controversial stuff ... :).
...

and now tell me, why this is a bad idea ... :)

greetings

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