Autotools

Item 12: Disabling Undesirable Targets

Sometimes the Autotools do too much for you. Here's an example from the Automake mailing list:

I use automake in one of my projects along with texinfo. That project has documentation full of images. As you probably know, 'make pdf' makes a PDF document from JPGs and PNGs, whereas 'make dvi' requires EPSs. However, EPS images are insanely large (in this case like 15 times larger than JPGs).

The problem is that running 'make distcheck' results in error since the EPS images that should be there aren't there and 'make distcheck' tries to run 'make dvi' everywhere. I would like to run 'make pdf' instead, or at least to disable building DVI. Is there any way to accomplish that?

First a little background information: ...