Re: Multiple Dist- Commands Fails

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Luiji,

thanks for the report.

* Luiji Maryo wrote on Fri, Jul 09, 2010 at 01:13:32AM CEST:
> I wanted to distribute all seven formats (because I like having
> everything available, even if its too much), so I ran "make dist-zip
> dist-shar dist-bz2 ..." for my program.  Only the first one I
> specified worked, and the rest contained 0 files, or just plain
> failed.  After researching the generated Makefile, I saw that each
> ``dist-'' command called ``distdir'', after which it would run the
> utilities in a way that the directory outputted by ``distdir'' would
> be deleted.  Since make will only run ``distdir`` once, the rest of
> the commands have no files to work on.
> 
> My proposal is to somehow allow ``distdir'' to be called multiple
> times or, alternatively, have the ``dist-'' commands not delete the
> files and find out some way to delete them once all ``dist-'' commands
> have completed (the former probably being easier then the later).

I don't know how to get that to work with portable make that has no
order-only prerequisites or similar fancy techniques.  I agree though
that the limitation to all only one of the dist-* targets at a time
should be documented better.  Even more generally, most of the publicly
documented targets don't work so well when multiple of them are given on
the command line and parallel make is used.  I have an unfinished
documentation patch for this, let's see ...

> For now, I can just run each ``dist-'' command individually.

Well, you could use dist-zip dist-shar dist-bz2 ... Automake options to
have the various tarballs all be created by default from "make dist",
that will work to do things at once.  With git Automake, it will even
run the compressors in parallel.

Downside of using the options is that "make dist" will fail for users
who don't have all compressors installed.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf