How can I temporarily exclude certain directories from build?

While hacking a program it might be useful to exclude certain directories from build that would otherwise be recompiled, but don't actually need to be. Also, if you checked out source code that didn't compile and you don't have the time or knowledge to fix the error you might want to turn off compilation of the directory alltogether. There are two cases. Toplevel directories, and subdirectories. For toplevel directories you can simply erase them (or not check them out). If for some reason you don't want to do that, you can also set DO_NOT_COMPILE="someapp" before calling configure, this will make configure skip "someapp". To only compile very few toplevel dirs, instead of using DO_NOT_COMPILE to exclude most of them, you can list in a file named 'inst-apps', at the toplevel, the toplevel subdirs you want to compile. To turn off compilation of any directory, including subdirectories, you have to modify the Makefile or Makefile.am files. Makefile.am is not recommended because that file ...  more