Root Makefile.am in Simple KDE App

[Steven T. Hatton]

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If anybody cares to annotate the file reproduce below, it would probably be 
valuable for future reference. I've added my questions as comments.  I'll do 
what I can to answer these myself.  The Autotools documentation seems a bit 
inconsistent between different tools, and different versions can have 
important differences which change the meaning of things.  It gets rather 
confusing.

#<project-root>/Makefile.am created by the C++ Simple KDE Application template

# What is the purpose of this file?  Where is the documentation for this kind
# of file?

# Where is the value of TOPSUBDIRS assigned.  When is this expression 
# evaluated? What does SUBDIRS mean, and what purpose does it serve? What 
# value will it have?
SUBDIRS = $(TOPSUBDIRS)

# Where is top_srcdir defined? What will its value be? How shoud the
# expression be read?

$(top_srcdir)/configure.in: configure.in.in $(top_srcdir)/subdirs
	cd $(top_srcdir) && $(MAKE) -f admin/Makefile.common configure.in ;

# What happens here?
$(top_srcdir)/subdirs:
	cd $(top_srcdir) && $(MAKE) -f admin/Makefile.common subdirs

# What are acinclude.m4 and /admin/acinclude.m4.in ?
# What happens in this step of processing? 
$(top_srcdir)/acinclude.m4: $(top_srcdir)/admin/acinclude.m4.in 

#  What happens here?  What does `@cd' mean? 
$(top_srcdir)/admin/libtool.m4.in
	@cd $(top_srcdir) && cat admin/acinclude.m4.in admin/libtool.m4.in > \	
acinclude.m4

#What is assigned to MAINTAINERCLEANFILES, and how is it used? 
MAINTAINERCLEANFILES = subdirs configure.in acinclude.m4 configure.files 

#What is package-messages?  A command? A label? A variable? What is `merge'?
#What happens when this is evaluated?
package-messages:
	cd $(top_srcdir) && $(MAKE) -f admin/Makefile.common package-messages
	$(MAKE) -C po merge

# These are additional files beyond what is processed as source or part of the 
# build system. 
EXTRA_DIST = admin $LICENSEFILE$ configure.in.in

# What is this step?  What is am_edit? `-padmin'? top_distdir?
dist-hook:
	cd $(top_distdir) && perl admin/am_edit -padmin
	cd $(top_distdir) && $(MAKE) -f admin/Makefile.common subdirs

- -- 
Regards,
Steven
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