Question

This link mentions wildcards as a way to automatically list the SOURCES and HEADERS in the Makefile.am file. It also mentions that some people write external scripts to generate those files.

Do you know of the standard way of automatically including all the *.h *.cpp here, or should I just write my own Perl script to generate them. Do you have such a script already that you use?

PS: I organize the source files in my project according to the following purely-logical separation of directories:

src/dog/woof.h
src/dog/woof.cpp
src/cow/moo.h
src/cow/moo.cpp

Answer 1

Automake won’t add this feature. It makes assumptions that a particular .h or .cpp file is associated with a particular project. That assumption holds for a number of common project layouts and fails for any layout that differs.

For example, I’ve had projects that were laid out as

src/module/code
src/app/code
src/library/code
include/headers

built from one central makefile in the root. Other times, I’ve had the same layout built from four makefiles in the appropriate local directories.

There’s a lot of variability in projects. Some keep public header files mixed with private headers files in the code directories, some keep them separate. Some build shared object libraries, some don’t. Some ship code that’s not SUPPOSED to compile on incompatible platforms.

To put in a wild card inclusion would actually pose a great risk of limiting the functionality, and for those odd people who do things like ‘file.template.c’ and such it would be fatal.

If you consider it a flaw of automake, that’s fine; however, it’s one of those flaws that automake embraces as it’s preserved in the effort to make things more flexible. Automake doesn’t impose the “how” you do things, it provides a lot of enabling tools, but it goes out of it’s way to ensure that you aren’t forced into one “method” of laying out or building your code.