Re: $(srcdir)/foo is not generated because $(srcdir)/$(srcdir)/foo exists

[Peter Johansson]

Thanks Ralf for your quick reply,

On 2/13/11 2:44 AM, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> I would prepend all lines of a rule with a TAB, not just those not
> following a backslash-escaped newline.  I'm actually not totally sure
> whether that was for portability to non-Posix make or so automake would
> parse things reliably.

Thanks for your suggestions; I've implemented them.
> > else
> > ## this is needed in 'svn export' build
> > $(srcdir)/.revision:
> >      echo "">  $@
> I don't see why you should need this rule here.  The .revision file is
> distributed, so it should already exist.  At most I'd add a stub target
>
>    $(srcdir)/.revision:
>
> here.  Maybe I'm missing something?
There are three ways you can get and build the package:

1) retrieve package.tar.gz and './configure; make'

2) svn checkout http://package.org/svn and do './bootstrap; ./configure; 
make'

Subversion provides a third way which is

3) svn export http://package.org/svn and do './bootstrap; ./configure; make'

The svn export command is a way to get what subversion refers to as a 
clean tree, i.e., only the files committed to the repository and no 
`.svn' directories with information about which revision which branch or 
anything. To be honest I'm not sure about the usefulness of this 
feature, but that discussion belongs elsewhere.

Anyway, in my case above: if a user chooses to 'svn export', file 
.revision is not there because it is not checked into the repository. 
And we can not use subversion to figure out what `.revision' since the 
tree holds no such information. Therefore, if we wanna support "svn 
export builds" we need to create the file `.revision' somehow although 
it cannot contain any useful information.

After sending my email yesterday I chose to move the creation of 
.revision to Autoconf time. That is if there is no .revision and no .svn 
directory I create a dummy .revision. This also removed my original 
problem referred to in the subject.

Thanks again,
Peter