Re: 1.5 automatically generating C++, F77 tags

[Albert Chin]

On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 08:56:38AM -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Alexandre Duret-Lutz wrote:
> 
> > >>> "Albert" == Albert Chin <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> >  Albert> I don't have a problem requiring AC_PROG_CXX, AC_PROG_F77, or
> >  Albert> AM_PROG_GCJ before AC_PROG_LIBTOOL. Anyone see this as a problem?
> >
> > As a user I wouldn't care about this little inconvenience if it
> > allows Libtool not to bloat my configure with useless checks.
> >
> > However, requiring this will break thousands of configure.ac.  I
> > expect most of them to run AC_INIT, AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE,
> > AC_PROG_LIBTOOL early, and then go on with other checks such as
> > language checks.
> 
> This is true.  It may be very inconvenient for some packages to change
> the ordering.
> 
> > Maybe this could be changed as follows:
> 
> It is generally not a good approach to base a design on side-effects
> or assumptions.  Up to now, adding AC_PROG_LIBTOOL to a configure.ac
> file has been sufficient to configure libtool, regardless of whether
> libtool is stand-alone or embedded.  This behavior should not be
> altered.
> 
> I believe that a much better solution is to add a AC_LIBTOOL_TAGS (or
> AC_LIBTOOL_LANGUAGES) macro which can be used like
> 
> AC_LIBTOOL_TAGS([c c++])
> AC_PROG_LIBTOOL

This means we'd have to get rid of --with-tags. As it's not
documented, I'm for this. If someone specifies AC_LIBTOOL_TAGS, and
say C++ isn't specified, I don't want AC_PROG_CXX dragged in.

I'll try and code this up.

-- 
albert chin (address@hidden)