Re: $(OBJECTS), built_sources, and automake bugs

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Frank Belew <frb ximian com> writes:

> It has come to our attention that there is a 'bug' introduced between
> automake 1.4p5 and automake 1.5 that causes the use of $(OBJECTS)
> dependencies on built_sources to break
> 
> with automake 1.4p5, you get lines like these in a Makefile:
> SOURCES = $(libgnomeui_2_la_SOURCES) $(gnome_segv2_SOURCES)
> OBJECTS = $(libgnomeui_2_la_OBJECTS) $(gnome_segv2_OBJECTS)
> 
> with automake 1.5, you only get the SOURCES line
> 
> this wreaks havoc if you set 
> $(OBJECTS): $(built_sources)
> 
> 
> The simplest fix with the most work on the gnome maintainers is to use
> $(libgnomeui_2_la_OBJECTS): $(built_sources) or something similar for
> your module
> 
> The hardest fix is to patch automake properly
> 
> If anyone has any better ideas, please present them, but at the current
> time, automake 1.5 breaks building gnome2.

automake-1.5 should be considered to be incompatible with
automake-1.4.  A package needs to be compiled with one or the other,
and the maintainer needs to make the decision. I've put some hacks
into Pango and GTK+ to make them work a bit better with automake-1.5
since the gnome-python people need it, but using automake-1.5 for
GTK+ is not supported, and will not be supported until we (the 
maintainers) switch over, at which point using automake-1.4 will
not be supported.

I don't think the above is really a bug - using $(OBJECTS) in
this fashion is documented nowhere in the automake documentation -
it's just a hack that has been copied around a lot. (BUILT_SOURCES
should work well enough in automake-1.5 that using hacks like
this instead of BUILT sources shouldn't be necessary.)

Regards,
                                        Owen