On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 11:24:59AM +0000, Mark Blackman said: > And that example unintentionally reversed the dependency order > as well as leaving out the 'do all such files' bit. > > It should have been '.pod.l' and needs a pseudo target like 'all' > to trigger the transformation rules.
I was heartened at first because that was the direction I'd been heading in too except ... I've just tried every combination I can think of and it's still not working (although it's perfectly possible that I missed some out). *sigh* The file in question is here http://github.com/crucially/timesplicedb/blob/master/man/Makefile.am for what it's worth. I haven't touched autotools and friends for a while now and I'd forgotten how generally loathesome they are. Specifically the fact the syntax seems to delight in being as complicated, illogical, inconsistent and unreadable as possible and the docs are awful - if you can find the section you're looking for it generally has one, very specific example with no explanation thus rendering it tricky, if not impossible to adapt to your situation. At $work[-3] we switched a autoconf system to scons and that was pretty nice but it's just not a practical consideration if you're trying to distribute OS C software - everyone expects ./configure; make; make install