On Friday 02 September 2011, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski wrote:
> On 09/01/2011 09:35 PM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> > Hi Zbigniew, sorry for the shameful delay.
> No problem. Autotools are great anyway :)
>
Glad to hear that :-)

> > I'm quite ignorant about vala and also its support in automake,
> I think that the support is in general adequate -- systemd uses vala and 
> in general things get build like they are supposed too.
>
Again, glad to hear that.

> > but I do
> > think that VPATH builds are not really supported for vala.
> So it seems.
>
I mean, they are supported for distributed tarball (and this is checked in
the automake testsuite), but not for from-scratch builds, like e.g. from a
fresh git checkout.

> > Anyway, it would be nice to at least expose the problem in the Automake
> > testsuite, even if only as an XFAIL; do you have a minimal use case
> > exposing the issue?
> I've taken the hello world example from vala tutorial and wrapped it with
> Makefile.am and configure.ac.
> 
> It builds fine locally, and fails when build from an external directory:
> 
> /tmp/build % ~/src/vala_autotools_test/configure
> ...
> /tmp/build % make
> make: *** No rule to make target 
> `/home/zbyszek/src/vala_autotools_test/hello_vala.stamp', needed by 
> `/home/zbyszek/src/vala_autotools_test/src/hello.c'.  Stop.
> 
> The example is attached. Three files: configure.ac and Makefile.am go in 
> the root directory of the source tree, hello.vala goes into src/.
>
Thanks; I can reproduce the error, and I've managed to reduce your minimal
test case even more.  I've applied the attached patch to the 'maint' branch
in the automake repository.  The bug report remains open though, since for
closing it we should either fix the limitation or at least document it.

> Zbyszek
> 

Thanks,
  Stefano