If you've ever read Peter Miller's excellent paper,
Recursive Make Considered Harmful, the preceding section on the use of
subdirectories 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 provides sufficient cross-directory support 1 to enable you
to write a single Makefile.am for a complex multi-directory
package.
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 Dist). For instance:
nobase_dist_pkgdata_DATA = images/vortex.pgm
We believe. This work is new and there are probably warts. See Introduction, for information on reporting bugs.