severity 14079 minor stop Hi Mostafa. Thanks for the report, and sorry for the shameful delay.
On 03/28/2013 08:11 AM, Mostafa wrote: > Hello, > > Absolute paths in EXTRA_DIST will cause "make distcheck" failure. > Yes, Automake doesn't really support distributing files outside the source tree and the build tree [1]. While that might work, it is more by accident than by design; we should make the users aware of this fact. [1] Unless you write a careful 'dist-hook' target yourself. > Attached is a set of files to reproduce the error. The description of how > to reproduce the error and my analysis of why it occurs can be found in > "$(top_srcdir)/build_autotools/README". > Thank you for taking time to do that. I'll copy and paste the most relevant part of your analysis, for reference: If you look at the above generated Makefile you see that the data structure "dist_files" is populated using the variables from EXTRA_DIST by stripping prefixes from those variables that match "$(srcdir)" and "$(top_srcdir)", but not their absolute path variants. Hence the following fails when executed because "$$file" expands to an absolute path and "$$d" expands to ".": cp -p $$d/$$file "$(distdir)/$$file" > Please note that nowhere in the automake documentation does it say one > cannot use absolute paths in EXTRA_DIST. > Perhaps we should enhance the documentation (esp. section 14, "What Goes in a Distribution") to make this Automake limitation clearer. Care to attempt a patch. Otherwise I'll get to it, eventually (hopefully soon). > Thanks, > > Mostafa Best regards, Stefano