Re: order of programs run by autoreconf

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Vincent,

* Vincent Torri wrote on Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 09:59:03AM CEST:
> 
> In the autoconf manual, it is said that autoreconf runs the programs
> autoconf, autoheader, aclocal, automake, libtoolize, and autopoint.
> But when I run autoreconf -v to see what is running, the order is
> different (that is aclocal, libtoolize, autoconf, autoheader and
> automake). Does it mean that the order mentioned in the doc is not
> the correct one ?

autoreconf may run any of the above commands.  It may run some of them
more than once.  It uses an order that is "right" most of the time.

For example, aclocal needs to be run before we can trace things (using
autoconf --trace) to find out whether Libtool is used; if yes, then we
run libtoolize, and if we pass --install to that, it means we have to
rerun aclocal afterwards, and autoconf after that.  There's more logic
in there.

Note that if you need to avoid running one of the programs, you can
override the appropriate environment variable, e.g.,
  env AUTOPOINT=true autoreconf -vi

If you have needs not met by current autoreconf, I suggest you describe
them (ideally with a small reproducible example) so we can think about
integrating them.

Thanks,
Ralf