Dear LazyWeb - FreeBSD makefiles

[Simon Wistow]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 11:24:59AM +0000, Mark Blackman said:
> And that example unintentionally reversed the dependency order
> as well as leaving out the 'do all such files' bit.
> 
> It should have been '.pod.l' and needs a pseudo target like 'all'
> to trigger the transformation rules.

I was heartened at first because that was the direction I'd been heading 
in too except ... I've just tried every combination I can think of and 
it's still not working (although it's perfectly possible that I missed 
some out).

*sigh*

The file in question is here 

http://github.com/crucially/timesplicedb/blob/master/man/Makefile.am

for what it's worth.

I haven't touched autotools and friends for a while now and I'd 
forgotten how generally loathesome they are. Specifically the fact the 
syntax seems to delight in being as complicated, illogical, inconsistent 
and unreadable as possible and the docs are awful - if you can find the 
section you're looking for it generally has one, very specific example 
with no explanation thus rendering it tricky, if not impossible to adapt 
to your situation.

At $work[-3] we switched a autoconf system to scons and that was pretty 
nice but it's just not a practical consideration if you're trying to 
distribute OS C software - everyone expects ./configure; make; make 
install