Re: bug#11793: AM_MISSING_PROG undocumented

[Eric Blake]

On 06/26/2012 04:56 PM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:

>>> AM_MISSING_PROG has been around for a while (git log says it was
>>> introduced in 1997, although the current two-argument version appears to
>>> date back to commit 9ae48df in Nov 1999), and seems like something
>>> stable enough to be worth guaranteeing.
>>
>> And if we document AM_MISSING_PROG, then autoconf should suggest using it.
>>
> Or, given that 'missing' in its current lightweight incarnation has become
> a more flexible, predictable and probably also more stable tool, it could
> be moved (together with the definition of the AM_MISSING_PROG macro) to a
> third-party package (either Autoconf or Gnulib).  WDYT?

I'm not quite ready for that; it's still pretty heavily tied to automake
(the idea of what forms a maintainer tool vs. a normal tool is more
automake's domain, not autoconf's).  I'm happy to keep 'missing' in
automake for a while longer, and remove it from gnulib mirroring, which
will give automake the freedom to improve it as an internal tool.

>> Furthermore, it might be nice if automake were smarter about autotest
>> suites built by autoconf, as the current method for running an autotest
>> suite is rather verbose in Makefile.am.
>>
> Absolutely.  Patches welcome ;-)

Slowly but surely starting the process of sending patches :)

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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