If you’ve ever read Peter Miller’s excellent paper, Recursive
Make Considered Harmful, the preceding sections on the use of make
recursion will probably come as unwelcome advice. For those who
haven’t read the paper, Miller’s main thesis is that recursive
make invocations are both slow and error-prone.
Automake is intended to have sufficient cross-directory support to enable you to write a single Makefile.am for a complex multi-directory package. (If it seems to be lacking, please report the issue as usual.)
By default an installable file specified in a subdirectory will have its directory name stripped before installation. For instance, in this example, the header file will be installed as $(includedir)/stdio.h:
include_HEADERS = inc/stdio.h
However, the ‘nobase_’ prefix can be used to circumvent this path stripping. In this example, the header file will be installed as $(includedir)/sys/types.h:
nobase_include_HEADERS = sys/types.h
‘nobase_’ should be specified first when used in conjunction with either ‘dist_’ or ‘nodist_’ (see Fine-grained Distribution Control). For instance:
nobase_dist_pkgdata_DATA = images/vortex.pgm sounds/whirl.ogg
Finally, note that a variable using the ‘nobase_’ prefix can often be replaced by several variables, one for each destination directory (see The Uniform Naming Scheme). For instance, the last example could be rewritten as follows:
imagesdir = $(pkgdatadir)/images soundsdir = $(pkgdatadir)/sounds dist_images_DATA = images/vortex.pgm dist_sounds_DATA = sounds/whirl.ogg
This latter syntax makes it possible to change one destination directory without changing the layout of the source tree.
Currently, ‘nobase_*_LTLIBRARIES’ are the only exception to this rule, in that there is no particular installation order guarantee for an otherwise equivalent set of variables without ‘nobase_’ prefix.