Re: [Libmesh-devel] Still Really Dislike Automake

[Derek G. <fri...@gm...>]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 6:28 PM Paul T. Bauman <ptb...@gm...> wrote:

>
> It just occurred to me that in fact there are autoconf macros that should
> do exactly this so configure should be able to generate the symlinks at
> configure time and remove the need to manually run a shell script for
> symlinking. I will look into this because this is super annoying. It will
> not remove the need to run the script to add the file names to the build
> system though.
>

Building these with configure is (arguably) worse.  I don't want to have to
run configure when I add a new header!

No - these should be in the _Makefile_.  You can write a generic rule that
will generate them.

Why is everyone so afraid of actually writing Make?  I don't get it.

Here is the bit of Makefile I created for doing something similar for MOOSE:

https://github.com/idaholab/moose/blob/devel/framework/moose.mk#L60-L93

It works for every header file - in every directory and symlinks them all
into another directory.

It NEVER has to change: no matter if you add header files, add directories,
add sub-directories, rename directories... ANYTHING. It is absolutely
full-proof because it puts the symlink generation into the same dependency
resolution stream as everything else in the Makefile.

This is what I'm talking about - create a good, generic Make-based build
system and it should never have to change (unless you actually want to
change the behavior of the build system itself).

Derek