automake: exclude intermediary source file from "dist" tarballs

Question

I have a intermediary source file foobar.c which is automatically generated from foobar.c.in via a sed script. The dist target created via autotools includes foobar.c in the generated tarballs. What do I do in Makefile.am or in configure.ac to exclude foobar.c?

Answer 1

The solution is actually quite simple

nodist_foobar_SOURCES = foobar.c
BUILT_SOURCES = foobar.c

This way automake knows that foobar.c is generated at build time, and since it's in nodist_ it won't be redistributed.

Although depending on what kind of string you're talking about a common way to solve it is to use a preprocessor macro and have it passed as CPPFLAGS

foobar_CPPFLAGS = "-DSOMESTRING=\"$(somevariable)\""

and then just use SOMESTRING in the code and let the preprocessor handle it.

Answer 2

I solved my problem by changing from using a sed script to modify foobar.c.in to having configure determine the needed strings and stick them into config.h, which is included by a non-intermediary version of foobar.c. config.h isn't included in the tarballs.

However, it still seems like there should be some method to tell autotools to exclude certain files from the dist tarballs.