Re: GNUmakefile missing from build dir in VPATH build

[Jim Meyering]

"James Youngman" <address@hidden> wrote:
> VPATH builds work for me in current coreutils head.  However,
> "distcheck" gails.
>
> GNUmakefile  exists in $(top_srcdir) but not the build directory.
> Distcheck does "make distcheck-hook".  That's defined in the Makefile
> (from $(top_srcdir)/Makefile.am):-
>
> distcheck-hook: check-ls-dircolors
>         $(MAKE) my-distcheck
>
> Unfortunately my-distcheck is only defined in GNUmakefile, not in
> Makefile.   So this error results:

Thanks for reporting that.
I've known about this problem for a long time, but it hasn't
ever seemed worth the trouble of fixing it.  Since I invariably
run "make distcheck" from the source directory, even if I did
fix it, I would rarely exercise that code path.

And "make distcheck" takes long enough as it is without adding
a second run for a non-srcdir build, that I don't want to automate
it that way.

But if you're interested, and the changes aren't too invasive,
who knows... :-)