Re: what is this shell call trying to solve?

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Hari" == Raja R Harinath <harinath@cs.umn.edu> writes:

Hari> That code is there support non-srcdir builds in the face of
Hari> 'make's with broken VPATH implementations.  If you look at the
Hari> Makefile, you'll see that it is checking to see whether 'make'
Hari> said that the source file was in $(srcdir), and if not, the
Hari> 'echo' supplies the $(srcdir).

Actually it is even more subtle than that, I think.

For explicit rules (not suffix rules), there are some macros like $<
that we can't use.  For some versions of make, these macros only have
values in suffix rules.  So we have to do srcdir-searching by hand in
explicit rules for GNU make, so that the code will continue to work in
a srcdir-build context for vendor makes.

I don't like this, but I don't see what we can do about it.
Even finding a way to reject non-srcdir builds for non-GNU make won't
help here.

Tom