When you use a VCS that makes it easy to manage several braches, it’s easy to get conflicts in the .list file used to generate the C marshallers. I recently fixed this problem in WebKit stealing some code used at least by various Telepathy components and by avahi-gobject, and I want to share the solution so every project can benefit from it.

First of all you have to open your Makefile.am and move the myproject-marshal.list file from EXTRA_DIST to BUILT_SOURCES and add somewhere in the file:

myproject-marshal.list: $(myproject_SOURCES) Makefile.am
        ( cd $(srcdir) && \
        sed -n -e 's/.*myproject_marshal_([[:upper:][:digit:]]*__[[:upper:][:digit:]_]*).*/1/p' \
        $(myproject_SOURCES) ) \
        | sed -e 's/__/:/' -e 'y/_/,/' | sort -u > $@.tmp
        if cmp -s $@.tmp $@; then \
                rm $@.tmp; \
        else \
                mv $@.tmp $@; \
        fi

Then remember to remove the myproject-marshal.list file from your VCS (svn/git/hg/bzr rm).

The code will search for all the functions looking like myproject_marshal_RETTYPE__ARG1TYPE_ARG2TYPE and generate the myproject-marshal.list from them, regenerating automatically the list when you change a signal signature.

Update: fixed the blackslashes in the code that were misteriously eaten by WordPress.