Re: Howto use autoconf-archive

[Peter Johansson]

Hi,

Peter Simons wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
>  > It is also possible to let aclocal do the copying of files into `m4'
>  > but based on your email it seems you aclocal doesn't know where
>  > autoconf-archive macros are installed.
>
> Gordon said that he calls "aclocal" without any flags. I don't know
> Ubuntu, so I may be wrong, but it might be worth trying
>
>   aclocal --install
>
> or
>
>   aclocal -I m4 --install
>
> instead. The help string for the --install option says: "copy
> third-party files to the first -I directory".
The difference between `aclocal -I m4 --install' and `aclocal -I m4' is 
that he latter will copy and paste macros into aclocal.m4, whereas 
without the --install flag aclocal will copy the file to directory m4 
(in this case) and only add an m4_include([m4/ax_foo.m4] to aclocal.m4. 
The idea with that is that the file will be included in the 
distribution. This makes it easier for installers who want to rerun 
autoconf because they don't need to have the macro files installed. More 
importantly, if the project is available in git, subversion or similar, 
it can be quite a headache if not all macro files are available in the 
file structure. For that to work all developers must have all macro 
files installed and set up aclocal to find these macro files.


>  Based on the assumption
> that Ubuntu installs the archive's macros into a system location where
> aclocal finds them, this should do the trick.
>   
Calling with `--install' or not will not affect whether aclocal finds 
the macro files as described above and I therefore concluded that the 
setup of Gordon's aclocal does not find archive's macros.

A typical case is that aclocal is installed into `/usr/bin' and aclocal 
is installed with prefix `/usr/local' (default). In that case the macro 
files will be installed into `/usr/local/share/aclocal/' and aclocal 
will not look into this directory. IMHO, the preferable way to fix that 
is to add a file create a file `/usr/share/aclocal/dirlist' that 
contains the line:

/usr/local/share/aclocal

Please refer to the Automake manual for more details

http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html#Macro-Search-Path

Cheers,
Peter

--
Peter Johansson

svndigest maintainer, http://dev.thep.lu.se/svndigest
yat maintainer,       http://dev.thep.lu.se/yat