Re: Building ncurses with libtool (32/64 bit)

[Thomas Dickey]

On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Albert Chin wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 07:42:39PM -0500, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> > On Thu, 15 Jan 2004, Albert Chin wrote:
> >
> > My current understanding of it (and am still reading) is that it's done
> > to ensure that the files in the distribution are a particular version.
> > I'm looking into the possibility of providing a short script which would
> > use the system's copy of libtool.m4 (preferred from my standpoint for a
> > lot of reasons).
>
> libtool.m4 is integrated into configure so it's impossible to make
> use of it at runtime.
>
> I wouldn't worry about this. We'll keep our local patch.

I'm coming to that conclusion for a different reason.  I'd forgotten about
this aspect, but one of the (mis)features of recent autoconf is that
macros tend to not expand properly within the shell context.  Your patch
basically does this:

        if test $with_libtool = yes ; then
                AC_PROG_LIBTOOL
                more commands
        fi

while autoconf 2.57 expands it as this:

        content of AC_PROG_LIBTOOL
        if test $with_libtool = yes ; then
                no content from AC_PROG_LIBTOOL
                more commands
        fi

I recall seeing several complaints about related behavior; autoconf
maintainers gave poor (both senses) excuses for it.  I seem to recall
that there's some way to prod autoconf's internals to force it to do
the right thing.  If there is, perhaps it should be documented.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net