Re: Adding site specific rules to Automake

[mlist dot gnu dot automake at urs dot us]

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

    tom> Probably not.  That would basically be a fork; nobody else
    tom> would be able to recreate your Makefiles.

    Matthew> Is there some documentation about this? I have read the
    Matthew> Automake documentation and haven't seen anything like
    Matthew> this except extending Automake with -local rules.

    tom> There isn't currently a built-in way to add a rule to all the
    tom> Makefiles in a tree.

    tom> One way you can do it by hand is to put common code into a
    tom> file that is then `include'd from each Makefile.am.

    tom> Having a way to do this automatically might be useful.  It
    tom> would need some design of course.  Maybe something that
    tom> worked like the existing -recursive rules would be the way to
    tom> go.  I'm not sure where or how you would specify it.

I do think it would be a good idea for automake to support site-wide
or project-wide rules.  The workaround I use is to run an 'automake-post'
script that inserts headers and footers into each Makefile.in.  I think
KDE does this too.  You can put anything into the extra stubs: rules,
tags, etc.

The *really smart* implementations of an 'automake-post' script would
also be able to splice in text in between the Makefile.in variable
declearations and the occurrence of the first rule...

C