Anyone considering playing with Makefiles and Automake should be very clear about the different ‘flavors’ of variables. 🙂

http://www.gnu.org/manual/make/html_mono/make.html#SEC67

Also Recursive Make Considered Harmful. makes a good read. I can see the sense in what the paper says, but this project is so inherently hierarchical in its structure, I think I would loose too much functionality if I switched to a big Makefile. eg. being able to set a debug flag on one branch of the tree. Or just build one sub-branch. I have already encountered one issue that he describes, but this kind of thing is always to be expected in a hierarchical system. I’ve structured the project such that anything in a subdirectory is a component of the directory above. This does not work for tests, because they need to be build/run after the module. So I have created a test directory which then in turn has a dir for each of the projects. *phew*. This has taken forever, but I think I’m actually getting close to getting back to coding.