Re: what is this shell call trying to solve?

[Akim Demaille <akim at epita dot fr>]

>>>>> "Tom" == Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com> writes:

>>>>> "Hari" == Raja R Harinath <harinath@cs.umn.edu> writes:
Tom> For explicit rules (not suffix rules), there are some macros like
Tom> $< that we can't use.

Hari> But, we're talking about suffix rules like [ ... ] $(LTCOMPILE)
Hari> -c -o $@ `test -f $< || echo '$(srcdir)/'`$<

Tom> I think that is probably a bug.  I can't think of why we'd be
Tom> doing that intentionally.  Can you?  Akim, do you know?

I don't think it is intentional.  It is the result of the
factorization in depend2.am: we use the same proto-rule for both
implicit and explicit rules.  Nothing prevents the re-separation, but
the idea was to simplify Automake, not to make it more complex to
produce cleaner Makefiles.  The point was making the maintenance
easier.

Now if that causes real problems, not just esthetics, then of course
it ought to be fixed.