Re: [PATCH 1/2] AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS: new macro, mostly for aclocal

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Stefano, Nick,

On Oct 18, 2012, at 4:04 PM, Stefano Lattarini <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 10/17/2012 10:05 PM, Nick Bowler wrote:
>> On 2012-10-17 09:25 +0200, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
>>> On 10/16/2012 10:46 PM, Nick Bowler wrote:
>>>> I think it's important to have, for testing, a version of aclocal that
>>>> actually makes use of this feature.
>>> The reason I wrote this patch is because I want to make use of this
>>> feature in aclocal 1.13.  See also:
>>> <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake-patches/2012-07/msg00030.html>
>> 
>> Right, I didn't mean to suggest that you weren't planning to use it:
>> what I'd like to see is
>> 
>> * a patch to autoconf (we have this: currently under discussion)
>> * a patch to aclocal
>> * a patch to libtoolize
>> 
>> so that people (like me) can apply all these patches, try to convert
>> their projects to use AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS, and actually see how things
>> behave first hand.  The linked aclocal patches don't seem like they'd
>> work with *this* autoconf patch under discussion.
> Of course, they were written before these autoconf patches :-)
> 
> Anyway, I agree some early testing by real users would be very useful,
> so here is a first cut at the Automake part of the AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS
> support (see attached patches).

Similarly, I've enhanced libtoolize to give priority to AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS,
and (for continued backward compatibility with less-than-bleeding-edge aclocal
and Autoconf) falling back to AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR and finally
ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS when determining where to install it's m4 macros.

You can fetch it from current git master:

  $ git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/libtool.git libtool--savannah
  $ cd libtool--savannah
  $ git checkout master
  $ ./bootstrap && ./configure --prefix=/path/to/test/tree && make all check

The recommendations to use ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS are still emitted by this
revision until there is a released aclocal that works without, at which point
I'll patch it again so that it only continues to give out that recommendation
if the installed aclocal (or binary pointed to by ACLOCAL) is an old enough
version that it's still required.

Shortly after the next release, I'm planning to split the libtool project into 
two:

  1. libtool.m4/ltmain.sh + support
  2. libltdl + support

At that point aclocal will take care of libtool.m4, and libltdl will no longer
support being embedded into a project source tree, so libtoolize will be little
more than:

  #!/bin/sh
  pkgdatadir=/usr/local/share/libtool
  aux_dir=`$pkgdatadir/extract-trace AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR |sed 1q`
  cp "$pkgdatadir/ltmain.sh" "${aux_dir-.}"

Let me know if I missed anything :)

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)