Re: autoreconf does not export -I option to aclocal

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 12:54:20PM +0300, Andrey Simonenko wrote:
> Autoreconf (from 2.61) does not export -I option to aclocal:
> 
> --- autoreconf.in.orig        Mon Oct 16 23:58:44 2006
> +++ autoreconf.in     Tue Apr 24 07:32:05 2007
> @@ -184,6 +184,7 @@
>  
>    # Dispatch autoreconf's option to the tools.
>    # --include;
> +  $aclocal    .= join (' -I ', '', @include);
>    $autoconf   .= join (' --include=', '', @include);
>    $autoconf   .= join (' --prepend-include=', '', @prepend_include);
>    $autoheader .= join (' --include=', '', @include);
> 
> ChangeLog entry can be:
> 
>       * bin/autoreconf.in: export --include option to aclocal.

no, the patch is wrong.

A wider picture:
What is your problem?  Perhaps ACLOCAL_FLAGS in top-level Makefile.am
can solve your problem.  Or perhaps /usr/share/aclocal/dirlist can
help.  See the automake manual for details, or mail to
address@hidden

A more detailed explanation:

There are two different options:

1)
The -I option of aclocal tells aclocal where to look for *.m4 files
with macro definitions.  (The files found are then copied to
the output file, aclocal.m4.)

Unfortunately, there is no corresponding option in autoreconf, so if
you decide to you autoreconf instead of a bootstrap script, you have
to live without this option.

2)
The options --include and --prepend-include to autom4te tell m4 where
to look for files included by m4_include.  These options are also
available in some programs which call autom4te (autoconf, autoheader)
and in autoreconf which calls these.

automake and aclocal, which come in a separate package called
Automake, do not propagate these options, though they call autom4te
internally, too (directly or via autoconf).

But AFAIK, these two options are rarely used, but the support in the
Autoconf package is consistent.


Hope this helps,
        Stepan Kasal