I created an example project called foo, its configure.ac is:
AC_PREREQ([2.69])
AC_INIT([foo], [1.0.0], [[email protected]])
AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR([foo.cpp])
AC_CONFIG_HEADERS([config.h])
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([foreign])
LT_INIT
AC_PROG_CXX
AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile])
AC_OUTPUT
and its Makefile.am is:
lib_LTLIBRARIES = libfoo.la
libfoo_la_SOURCES = foo.cpp
noinst_libfoo_la_DATA = test
When I run autoreconf -i, I get:
Makefile.am:3: error: 'noinst_libfoo_la_DATA' is used but 'noinst_libfoo_ladir' is undefined.
What is noinst_libfoo_ladir? I can’t seem to find documentation on this.
Your problem is this line, as indicated in the error:
noinst_libfoo_la_DATA = test
automake deals with these variable suffixes when deciding how to build. Note that suffixes ending in _DATA is not one of them. However, it does recognize _DATA as being installed in a location (e.g. data_DATA is installed in datadir). The location that noinst_libfoo_la_DATA would be installed to would therefore be in the variable noinst_libfoo_ladir, the definition of which does not exist in Makefile.am, hence the error.
So ladir is nothing. It's just suffixing noinst_libfoo_la with dir, trying to find an undefined variable. The same process applied to data_DATA would be data (strip off _DATA suffix) + dir = datadir. In order to not get an error, you would need to define something like:
noinst_libfoo_ladir = $(datadir)/libfoo
in Makefile.am. I'd call it something else since a noinst_ prefix has a special meaning for other things in autotools (don't install).