Re: aclocal only picking up /usr/local/share and not /usr/share

[Peter Johansson]

[removing automake-patches]

On 3/17/11 10:39 AM, Maynard Johnson wrote:
> > you aclocal calls.  Also, in the next automake release, aclocal
> > will probably support a new 'ACLOCAL_PATH' environment variable
> > that would help solving this kind of problems
> Well, you could always resort to adding proper `-I' option to
> Except this happens when building a 3rd party package.  Yes, I have 
> the source for that package, and, in fact, the first fix I did was to 
> update it's autogen.sh (where aclocal is called) to add '-I 
> /usr/share/aclocal'.  But that didn't seem like the right way to go 
> either for the general case (i.e., I don't think that's an appropriate 
> fix to contribute back to the package maintainer). I think the best I 
> can do is to suggest an FAQ on that package's web site that documents 
> the error and the solution.
I always copy third party m4 files to directory $(top_srcdir)/m4 and add
AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4])
in configure.ac and
ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I m4
in top Makefile.am. In that way there is never any problem for aclocal 
to find the files. Even if a new co-developer checks out a new copy from 
VCS he will have no problem but can just run
./bootstrap
./configure...

without even knowing what aclocal or it each path is.

I read the Automake manual
http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#Local-Macros
as that is the recommended way to set up things.

Cheers,
Peter