Hi there,
I desperately need a way out this limitation of Automake.
The problem is as follows: the Parma Polyhedra Library (http://www.cs.unipr.it/ppl/) provides foreign interfaces (C, OCaml, Prolog and Java) to a number of abstract domains. The abstract domains that are interfaced are selectable at configure time, and can be (literally) hundreds. The C++ code for the interfaces is automatically generated and we used to put it all in one file. However, this poses serious problems as the compilation of that (possibly gigantic) file easily causes GCC to consume gigabytes of main memory. We have now modified the generator so as to generate one C++ source per domain; we would like to compile all these files separately and and to put all the corresponding objects into a library.
Using the solution outlined in the Automake manual (i.e., using conditionals) would cause us to write enormous Makefile.am files which would be a maintenance nightmare. That is, now everything is automated; if we use a long chain of conditionals we would have to maintain consistency by hand.
Is there any other possibility? All the best,
Roberto