Re: subdir-objects fails with non-literal _SOURCES

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Jim,

* Jim Meyering wrote on Sat, Apr 21, 2007 at 09:10:22PM CEST:
> Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > ... what if make decides to rerun `config.status --recheck &&
> > config.status', say, because the user has his CONFIG_STATUS_DEPENDENCIES
> > wrong?  I don't see an easy, non-error-prone way to guard against the
> > ensuing endless loop.  Of course the same failure would happen at the
[...]
> No problem :-)  Just disable the potentially-offending rule in
> the temporary makefile that is probably already required -- see below.

That seems possible.  I'm a bit worried at all of this getting more and
more complicated.

FWIW, another approach to deal with non-literal *_SOURCES is to get it
right in `automake'.  That way, it won't work for @substituted@ values,
but that's not such an issue for the application you propose, I guess.

> > FWIW, I overlooked your (nice!) idea to avoid a temp makefile.
> 
> Thanks.  Unfortunately, I doubt usage like this
> is portable enough to use there:
> 
>   echo 'target:; rule...' | make -f Makefile -f - target"
> 
> So we'd need a temporary, makefile, as well as code to
> clean up afterwards (and upon interruption).

I'm pretty sure all modifications required so far can be put into the
form
  sed < $orig_makefile "$convoluted_sed_script" | $MAKE -f - target

(using the i, a, and d sed commands), but it certainly won't be fun to
debug for the casual bug observer.

I'll try to come up with a patch.

Cheers,
Ralf