Why doesn Automake support wildcards?
Developers are lazy. They would often like to use wildcards in Makefile.ams, so that they would not need to remember to update Makefile.ams every time they add, delete, or rename a file. There are several objections to this: • When using CVS (or similar) developers need to remember they have to run ‘cvs add’ or ‘cvs rm’ anyway. Updating Makefile.am accordingly quickly becomes a reflex. Conversely, if your application doesn’t compile because you forgot to add a file in Makefile.am, it will help you remember to ‘cvs add’ it. • Using wildcards makes it easy to distribute files by mistake. For instance, some code a developer is experimenting with (a test case, say) that should not be part of the distribution. • Using wildcards it’s easy to omit some files by mistake. For instance, one developer creates a new file, uses it in many places, but forgets to commit it. Another developer then checks out the incomplete project and is able to run ‘make dist’ successfully, even though a file is miss
