automake: Directories
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1 7 Directories
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1 For simple projects that distribute all files in the same directory it
1 is enough to have a single ‘Makefile.am’ that builds everything in
1 place.
1
1 In larger projects, it is common to organize files in different
1 directories, in a tree. For example, there could be a directory for the
1 program’s source, one for the testsuite, and one for the documentation;
1 or, for very large projects, there could be one directory per program,
1 per library or per module.
1
1 The traditional approach is to build these subdirectories
1 recursively, employing _make recursion_: each directory contains its own
1 ‘Makefile’, and when ‘make’ is run from the top-level directory, it
1 enters each subdirectory in turn, and invokes there a new ‘make’
1 instance to build the directory’s contents.
1
1 Because this approach is very widespread, Automake offers built-in
1 support for it. However, it is worth nothing that the use of make
1 recursion has its own serious issues and drawbacks, and that it’s well
1 possible to have packages with a multi directory layout that make little
1 or no use of such recursion (examples of such packages are GNU Bison and
1 GNU Automake itself); see also the ⇒Alternative section below.
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