Re: stdint module rewrite (was: Re: Build CVS (TRUNK) failed.)

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Bruno Haible wrote on Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 11:00:45PM CEST:
> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > You should be able to rewrite this to use shell loops for the most part;

> Actually, that's how I started doing it:

> But this way, autoheader didn't recognise the AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED
> invocations, i.e. in the end, HAVE_INT8_T etc. were not present in
> config.h.in.

Yes, but that's basically the only part that breaks this way.  And only
one part of the AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED, namely the part that needs to be
traceable for autoheader: the AH_TEMPLATE call.  So you can split the
macro in the same way that AC_CHECK_HEADERS uses.

> > Without the rewrite of macros to work with shell variables, even
> > Autoconf 3 won't be able to save you.
> 
> Ouch. I imagined most of the autoconf built-in macro invocations would
> be transformed into a single shell function call. Is this not the plan?

Sure this is the plan; but you have to be able to rewrite the built-in
macro into a shell function in the first place; this won't work for
AH_TEMPLATE, only for the rest.  This means that, even if Autoconf 3 may
be able to reduce the size of the expansion by some amount, it won't be
able to beat the size you can achieve by writing a shell loop in the
first place, because there will still be a nontrivial amount of
expansion per function call.

Cheers,
Ralf