* Steffen Dettmer wrote on Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 11:53:56AM CEST: > On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 7:53 AM, Ralf Wildenhues <ralf.wildenh...@gmx.de> > wrote: > > > would it be a potential possibility instead to `overwrite and > > > specialize' some macro? > > > > With "some macro", you mean "some prepended or appended makefile.am > > snippet" here, right? > > > > Well, my idea of the above would be that if you used > > AM_MAKEFILE_APPEND([bot1]) > [...] > > Yes, of course. The idea is good! > > > Do you have a good use case for this overwriting (that would > > justify this complication)? > > No, I don't have any. > > It's just that some of our (completely unrelated) source > generation tools (written in Perl) internally use some to write > content. First we had some prepend/append hooks but later found > it stronger to overwrite the content writing functions.
Well, can you give a specific example? I can probably see that this might be useful, but having a convincing example always helps. Really, designing new interfaces should be done right. We could easily have a fairly fat interface AM_MAKEFILE_INCLUDE([fragment], [placement], [pattern], [id]) where fragment names the file to include, placement is 'top' or 'bottom' or so, pattern matches the Makefile.am files to affect, and id a string or number which could mean that a later fragment with the same id will replace the earlier one. I am just not seeing how it can be useful. All the decisions of which fragments to include where _still_ have to be done at the time automake is run, the only variation postponed to configure run time you get is conditionals and @substitution@ expansions (as usual) within the files. > Probably all this are examples of DONT-DOs because relying on > internals that change without prior notice. We are purely speaking about new, to-be-public, user interfaces here. Things that users should be able to use with Automake 1.12. None of the above applies to current Automake. > But I think this is out of scope here. Much too complicated and > it would be more customizing automake than using a feature of it. Well, it is true that Automake is less easily extensible than it could be. The above could be a step in the right direction. Thanks, Ralf
