Re: aclocal flags are a pain

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Behdad Esfahbod wrote on Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 06:11:15AM CEST:
> Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> > Reading autoreconf source right now.  I may just switch to it if my testers
> > tell me it works on OS X and msys.
> 
> Ok, I see the following things that I like to be able to do but autoreconf
> does not do currently:

Most of which can be had, or at least worked around, by using the
overriding environment variables AUTOCONF, LIBTOOLIZE, ACLOCAL,
AUTOMAKE, no?

>   * Many autogen.sh scripts I've seen try each of automake, automake-1.10,
> automake-1.9 automake-1.8 automake-1.7 in that order to pick the first one
> available.  I'm sure there's good reason for them doing that.  Perhaps because
> of some stupid packaging by some distro at some time...

Which distro doesn't set plain 'automake' to be the latest version, at
least by default?

> My autogen.sh also
> checks for glibtoolize before libtoolize as I mentioned before.

Hmm, this is one thing that strikes me as a sensible change.

>   * My autogen.sh also checks the version of the available tools against those
> requested in configure.ac.  Would be trivial to do in autoreconf as it already
> traces configure.ac.

Not sure what you're after here.  The tools themselves will bail out
anyway if they are too old (discounting automake 1.4 here).  What's
the gain of having autoreconf bail out?

>   * GNOME packages also need to run intltoolize and gtkdocize.  Would be nice
> to add them in autoreconf.  I can cook a patch if there is interest.

No principled objections.  Is there a simple way to detect whether these
need to be run?

>   * Not sure about this one, but I think autoreconf options --force and
> --install kinda take my flexibility away to apply those to some of the tools
> but not others.  For example we have a hand written INSTALL file in cairo.
> Running "autoreconf --install --force" overrides my INSTALL file.  But I need
> those options for the libtoolize call.

Again, use environment variables to add --force on a case-by-case basis.
Or save and restore INSTALL.  (INSTALL is a debatable point.  There are
good arguments for overriding it, and good ones for keeping it, with
--force.  How to detect whether it was modified by the package author?)

Cheers,
Ralf