Re: Getting long SOURCES lines with subdirs shorter

On 2023-12-01 15:37, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> On Friday 2023-12-01 21:13, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>> On 17 Jul 2023 16:51, Karl Berry wrote:
>>> Hi Jan,
>>>
>>>     Current automake likely won't have anything in store already,
>>>
>>> Not that I know of.
>>>
>>>     a_SOURCES = $(addprefix aprog/,main.c foo.c bar.c baz.c)
>>>
>>> I've often wanted this myself. I'd certainly welcome a patch for it.
>>>
>>> Please work from automake trunk. None of the various branches are kept
>>> to date. (Sad but that's the reality.)
>>
>> prob stating the obvious, but $(addprefix) is a GNUism, so if we wanted to
>> use it, it'd required feature probing at configure time, and that always
>> complicates things :(
> 
> No-no, the idea was to make $(addprefix) an automakeism that is resolved before
> GNU make (or any other make) is ever invoked.

I suggest inventing a new syntax if this approach is taken, one that
doesn't overload real-world make syntax, since some people do use
Automake with GNU-make-specific rules and whatnot.  We already have
things like %reldir% which are expanded by Automake so maybe using
percent signs as a marker for "things expanded by automake" would
be a good starting point for this.

I do sometimes wish Automake had more built-in macro facilities.
One can do things like generate includeable snippets or preprocess
Makefile.am with, say, m4, but that adds a bunch of additional
complexity which is not always worthwhile.

Cheers,
  Nick