AC_INIT design bug or automake thinko?

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

Currently some configure.ac of mine starts like this:

  AC_PREREQ([2.59])
  AC_INIT
  AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR(intl/dcigettext.c)
  AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR(../build-aux)
  . $srcdir/../version.sh
  AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(gettext-runtime, $VERSION_NUMBER)

Now I would like to set some automake options. The automake doc says:

   Automatic dependency tracking can be suppressed by putting
   `no-dependencies' in the variable `AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS', or passing
   `no-dependencies' as an argument to `AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE' (this should be
   the preferred way).

and

   The second, deprecated, form of `AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE' has two required
   arguments: the package and the version number.

So the automake doc invites me to use

   AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([OPTIONS])

and to move the package and version information to the AC_INIT call. This
information comes from a file in the source directory called version.sh.
(Putting the version information into a file of its own, not configure.ac,
is because I don't want to regenerate all .info, man and .html files each
time I do a modification to configure.ac - it would be a waste of time.)
So, how can I invoke AC_INIT? I need the contents of version.sh for this.
To access it, I need $srcdir. But $srcdir is not defined before AC_INIT
has been executed!

Either the automake manual is wrong in suggesting to use AC_INIT for
setting the package and version. Or something needs to be done about this
circular dependency around AC_INIT.

A possible solution would be if autoconf would define a macro, say,
AC_CONFIG_PACKAGE in such a way that

   AC_INIT(package, version)

is equivalent to

   AC_INIT
   AC_CONFIG_PACKAGE(package, version)

In other words, AC_CONFIG_PACKAGE would set all the variables PACKAGE,
VERSION, AC_PACKAGE_NAME, PACKAGE_NAME, AC_PACKAGE_TARNAME, PACKAGE_TARNAME,
AC_PACKAGE_VERSION, PACKAGE_VERSION, AC_PACKAGE_STRING, PACKAGE_STRING,
AC_PACKAGE_BUGREPORT, PACKAGE_BUGREPORT.

Automake's AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE macro would also profit from such a macro:
currently it sets only the variables PACKAGE, VERSION, but not the other
10 variables.

Bruno