Re: MKDIR_P vs. mkdir_p and automake versions

[Stepan Kasal]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 07:55:26AM -0400, David Bruce wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 May 2008 04:37:16 am Stepan Kasal wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 11:22 -0400, David Bruce wrote:
> > > > "MKDIR_P" is recommended but requires automake-1.10 or higher.  [...]
> > > >  is there an acceptable workaround?
> >
> > forgive me stating the obvious, but the workaround is to use
> > $(mkdir_p).  It will work in Automake 1.10.x, perhaps even longer.
> 
> Well, of course. What I meant was that I wanted the code in the svn 
> repository 
> to be as "correct" as possible, so I used MKDIR_P.  My thought was whether 
> there was some sort of autotools conditional that would allow this to work 
> with automake 1.9 (i.e. if automake version < 1.10, define "MKDIR_P" to 
> be "mkdir_p").

Try this in configure.ac:

AC_DEFUN([MY_MKDIR_P], [
  m4_ifdef([AC_PROG_MKDIR_P],
    [AC_REQUIRE([AC_PROG_MKDIR_P])])
])
MY_MKDIR_P

or

m4_ifdef([AC_PROG_MKDIR_P], [AC_PROG_MKDIR_P])

The latter might mean that the macro is expanded second time, which
does not actually matter, but is somewhat inelegant.
But if you put that line before AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE, you might get the
first and the only expansion.

The former has to use AC_DEFUN because yoiu cannot have AC_REQUIRE
directly in configure.ac.

This was an interesting excercise; yet I believe $(mkdir_p) is the
solution.  Every project has certain small probability that it will
break on Automake upgrade to 1.11, 1.12, etc.  $(mkdir_p) is not
something which would increase that probability much.  And the above
hack is not safer--just a small fraction, but non-zero.

HTH,
        Stepan