retitle 9238 "make dist" when "." is in SUBDIRS severity 9238 minor thanks
References: <https://fedorahosted.org/pipermail/iwhd-devel/2011-August/000769.html> <http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=9238> Hi Jim, sorry for the delay. Jim Meyering wrote: > > I took a look at the generated Makefile.in and conclude that > there's an automake weakness when we use Makefile.am's SUBDIRS > variable to kludge dependencies by specifying "." not at the > end of the list. > > Notice how iwhd's Makefile.am is careful to list "." before "man" > in the SUBDIRS list: > > SUBDIRS = lib . gnulib-tests t man po > > With normal "recursive" rules, that ensures that iwhd is built > in "." before the binary is needed by help2man in man/. > > However, the problem is that while all of automake's so-called > RECURSIVE_TARGETS handle that special case of "." as expected, > the "distdir" rule does not. The distdir rule is at the core > of what is run when you do "make distcheck", and it merely skips > ".". > I'm not sure this can be qualified as a real weakness; could you show an real-world (or potentially so) example where the behaviour of `distdir' causes some concrete problem? And yes, I believe that the iwhd issue is *not* such an example, because even if you had everything under a single top-level directory, you would still need to run "make all" before "make dist" to correctly have the distributed `iwhd.8' manpage generated from the `iwhd' program (which wouldn't be there if you hadn't run "make all" in advance!). > > [SNIP] > Thanks, Stefano
