[Bashdb-devel] bashdb: make check vs. VPATH build

[R. B. <ro...@pa...>]

Thanks for the patches and thanks for the analysis and report. I've
applied all that I could without breaking "make distcheck". The
ChangeLog entry has what was done.

As you note, more work is needed to make GNU make's VPATH work. 

I made an attempt to copy the debugger files dbg_*.inc from the source
directory to the build directory in configure.ac, but whatever I did
wasn't correct. Alas I tire easily of trying to coax configure.ac
and/or automake to do what strikes me as fairly straightforward
things. (Actually, a big motivation for the bash debugger itself is to
be able to cope better with the whole configuration/build system.). So
I leave this for someone else to work out or for some other time.

Some comments about the patches aside those already in the changelog
entry. In test/run-misc, I needed to set $builddir.  In your patch I
see some derived files which are not in CVS deleted, e.g.
dbg-pre.inc. So of course that doesn't do anything, but I guess it
does no harm either. 

Some derived files are still put in the distribution because of the -L
option problem in bashdb. You are correct that those should be removed
and would be were it not for my inability to know how to make "make
distcheck" work without doing so. On the other hand, if configure is
run as it should be those files should get overwritten.

Eric Blake writes:
 > I'm having trouble getting 'make check' to work when doing a VPATH build. 
...