Re: [Autogen-users] [Help-autogen] Integration of autogen with autoconf

[Alexandre Duret-Lutz]

>>> "Bruce" == Bruce Korb <address@hidden> writes:

 Bruce> Geoff Quelch wrote:
 >> 
 >> Is there a web site anywhere that gives tips/suggestions for integrating
 >> autogen with autoconf. Neither of these tools' web sites has anything on
 >> this.
 >> One fairly trivial example would be to the version string. It is set in
 >> configure.in for autoconf and in the defs file for autogen, where they
 >> really are the same value.
 >> Thanks.

 Bruce> For AutoGen, I solved this problem by putting it into a separate
 Bruce> script that is sourced both by configure.in and in AutoGen's 
 Bruce> definition files, thus:

 >> version = `
 >> if test -z "$top_srcdir" || test ! -d "$top_srcdir"; then
 >> top_srcdir=..
 >> fi
 >> if test ! -f $top_srcdir/VERSION ; then
 >> echo "error $top_srcdir/VERSION file missing" >&2
 >> kill -2 ${AG_pid}
 >> exit 1
 >> fi
 >> . $top_srcdir/VERSION > /dev/null
 >> echo $AG_VERSION`;

 Bruce> But, you are also right, I should add a FAQ to AutoGen
 Bruce> with such hints and suggestions.  Thanks! - Bruce

There are some other ways that may be worth considering too.
(It's better if Autoconf knows these strings as litteral
values rather than shell variables: you can't --trace shell
variables.)

1) If you leave the version/package litteral strings
   in the AC_INIT arguments in configure.(ac|in), there are
   several ways to get them back from outside configure:

     - In configure.ac, use AC_CONFIG_FILES([VERSION]) to create 
       VERSION from VERSION.in.  VERSION may consists of just
       two lines, if that's what you need:
         address@hidden@
         address@hidden@
       Then you can source VERSION in your scripts.

     - In fact the VERSION script is not really needed.
       You can simply ask Autoconf for these values:
         eval `autoconf --trace 'AC_INIT:VERSION=$2;PACKAGE=$1'`
       However this is slower, and requires Autoconf.       

2) If you don't want to modify configure.ac to change the
   version, you can just `m4_define' version in a separate
   file, say `version.m4', add `m4_include([version.m4])' 
   in configure.ac, and pass the m4_defined value to AC_INIT.

3) If you allow VERSION to print the version to stdout, you can
   m4_esyscmd('VERSION') from configure.ac and define a
   AG_VERSION with the result.  This way it's still possible to
   source VERSION from a shell script, but you also have its
   value available as AG_VERSION in configure (tools can --trace
   it).  This seems in interesting solution to me.

-- 
Alexandre Duret-Lutz