"make" works. "make distcheck" doesn't.
 

I am converting some programs I wrote from gtk2 to gtk3, and making some other minor changes on the way.

The particular package that is giving me grief started out as a simple buttonbar to launch preselected programs and then acquired a couple of extra bits of desktop furniture: a mount tool (based on the one in Damn Small Linux) and a trashcan. There are two subdirectories under src: barbarella and accessories. I want to use the same header barbarella.h in both directories but distcheck doesn't allow that, neither with a copy nor with a link.

What do I do?

Well for one, provide the exact error message and a bit of context so we have a place to start?

This is the second stage of compilation. The first stage builds the barbarella bar and doesn't complain about anything. Then it tries to build the mount tool and chokes.

I don't understand what did you do, but based on the error message you need a -I<location of barbarella.h> into that gcc command.
By the way you have a lot of duplicates in it.

That's a good starting point. Now where do I specify that in an autotools package? I'm aware that I could define a CFLAGS environmental variable containing -I but that wouldn't get into the built package, would it?

In configure.ac? Here's the contents of that file if you're interested:
I never noticed that. Where did they all come from? I must admit that autotools is a black box for me.

I think we need to see the Makefile.am files.

The only active lines in the main one are:
src/barbarella:
And accessories
I can see it now: The accessories subdir does contain a copy of barbarella.h but it isn't being picked up by automake.

It can be an ugly solution to copy it to another directory where it can be found. I still can't see how the gcc command was constructed.

Have you considered doing away with all that autotools complexity and just using a plain old makefile? If it's a small project then it probably isn't worth the pain of dealing with autotools.

Admittedly, I'm in the "cure is worse than the disease" camp when it comes to autotools, so I'm biased. I like "simple" and autotools is anything but.

Forget it. I've completely screwed it up now. I'm going to start again with the last gtk2 version that definitely builds and I'll do the gtk3 conversion from there. I should be able to remember how I did it!?:scratch:

PS: The edited gtk3 versions of the actual program code files were in geany, so I copied them over to a rescue directory. I can use those for reference.

There's a few source files involved. I don't know enough about make to do it by hand.

I think that's because you didn't add the copied file to any of the lists. But you should just be able to add -I@top_srcdir@/barbarella to AM_CPPFLAGS in accessories/Makefile.am instead of having an extra copy.

https://www.gnu.org/software/automak...e.html#Headers

OK, now it works. My mistake was to try to have a single header for all three programs. Two of them are simple one-file programs, so they don't need a separate header.

"make distcheck" now works, so the initial query is solved.

The current version still loads some library headers multiple times and I don't know why, but it clearly isn't doing any harm.

That is not a problem. It is working, just not nice. The construction of gcc commands can be probably simplified, but not that important if otherwise working.

I guess there is some overlap in the include file paths for gtk+-3.0 and glib-2.0. I don't think it would be worth the trouble to reduce the duplication, actually I would just go and enable silent-rules so you don't have to see the verbosity most of the time.

https://www.gnu.org/software/automak...es-Option.html

Why bother? It doesn't do any harm, does it? I never even noticed it until pan64 mentioned it in #4.