Is there a way to tell automake not to interpret part of the automakefile?

Question

Is there a way to tell automake not to interpret part of the Makefile.am?

Specifically, I am trying to encode a Makefile conditional in a Makefile.am. As other peop

Answer 1

The reason automake does conditionals is because some dinosaur makes don't. That said, if you really must do this, you could define your snippet as a variable in configure.ac and AC_SUBST it into your Makefile. That way, automake won't get a chance to see it. Remember to use AM_SUBST_NOTMAKE to avoid creating a line like FOO = @FOO@.)

dnl In configure.ac:
snippet='
ifeq ($(somevar),Y)
foo
endif
'
AC_SUBST([snippet])
AM_SUBST_NOTMAKE([snippet])

and:

## In Makefile.am:
@snippet@

I sincerely hope there's a better way than this.