address@hidden news..

[Guido Draheim]

* autogen macros added
  Bruce Korb's latest achievement in his autogen project resulted in some
  fine macro pieces which I have added to an extra subcategorie in the 
  ac-archive sfnet-branch until it gets decided where to put them in the
  gnu-branch. I did also add a crosslink to http://autogen.sf.net to draw
  more attraction to his works. Let's see how that works...
* some macros updated
  I had some rework of my own macros to update them to work properly in
  the 2.5x generation - this is usually related to kill the m4-changequote
  in there which the multilevel macroisms in the new generation do not
  particularly like. I do also see that the bigendian_cross functionality
  is integrated in the cvs-tree which is good to hear but brings up the
  question what should be done with ac-macros being overrated by autoconf
  itself. For now, I let them rust in peace ;-)
* acinclude tool
  the growing popularity of the ac-archive has made some flaws to shine
  out badly stemming from the aclocals-installoption present only in the
  sfnet-branch. I tried to document the whys in an extra doc section on
  the frontpage at http://ac-archive.sf.net - and which lead me to invent
  a new tool called "acinclude" to help me solve the problems atleast for
  the moment. Well, this is not new code actually but a variant of the
  "aclocal" tool shipped for quite a time with the gnu autotools. Basically,
  it will construct an "acinclude.m4" file from the macros living in the
  ac-archive and other site-wide extension-directories from users or projects.
  This tool might be a bit controverse, so don't hesitate to hit me hard
  for any problems around this one ;-)

I had lately not much time to work on the sfnet-branch, so it still carries
the code-portions that were added to give the feel of the gnu-branch to
some extent. However neither me or Peter had time in the last months to 
solve out the remaining problems and I noticed that more and more people
got to notice the sfnet-branch which was never actually announced as a proper
project - I just needed a working place to put up my package files which
were already under heavy usage, so I could not wait longer than a week or two
after the aclocals-extras were backed out in the gnu-branch cvs. The use of
packaging files and version numbers however seems to be regarded as useful,
so I will adapt the current packaging system later on to let it stand on its
own feet - until then, don't get nervous about the current pile of six rpms
of wondrous naming and functionality as I'll clean that up next time around.

regards, guido