Re: The non-recursive-gnulib-prefix-hack module

[John W. Eaton]

On 11/27/2016 06:18 PM, Bruno Haible wrote:
> John,
>
> > I added
> >
> >    AC_CONFIG_LIBOBJ_DIR([libgnu])
> >
> > to my configure.ac file.  Maybe gnulib-tool could do this automatically
> > if --non-recursive-makefile is specified?
>
> gnulib-tool does not rely on AC_LIBOBJ and friends, because these autoconf
> macros assume that there is only one lib/ dir, whereas it is possible to
> have several gnulib-tool invocations in the scope of a single configure.ac
> file. Instead, the gnulib-tool generated gl_INIT method provides its own
> definition of AC_LIBOBJ for the scope of the modules and .m4 expansions
> that it pulls in.
>
> Therefore you should not need this
>     AC_CONFIG_LIBOBJ_DIR([libgnu])
> invocation.

I don't currently see how to make it work without using this macro.

> > it demonstrates what changes need to be made.
>
> This is very good to see.

I'm attaching a new patch that fixes a few more things and seems to work 
for me with Octave.

> One thing I don't like is to put directory names into the *.m4 files;
> this is
>   1. against the principle that *.m4 files should determine properties
>      of the platform, whereas Makefile.am contains file names,
>   2. a problem w.r.t. the requirement above to be able to use
>      several gnulib-tool invocations.
>
> So, instead of replacing
>     LIMITS_H=limits.h
> by
>     LIMITS_H=libgnu/limits.h
> I would prefer to replace
>     AC_SUBST([LIMITS_H])
> by
>     gl_FILENAME_SUBST([LIMITS_H])
>
> Here gl_FILENAME_SUBST is a (yet to be written) autoconf macro that takes

If that's better, it should be easy to change, though I don't have any 
more time to devote to this at the moment.

What I have now is

  LIMITS_H=${gl_REL_SOURCE_BASE}limits.h

With gl_REL_SOURCE_BASE defined to be "$sourcebase/" for non-recursive 
builds or "" otherwise.

> It should be done by gnulib-tool:
>   1. because it can already be done at this stage,
>   2. so that different gnulib-tool invocations in the scope of a single
>      configure file work.

I think I have this working, at least for the Makefile.am snippets in 
the module files now.

> > It seems like that would be easy enough just by arranging
> > to do something like
> >
> >    gl_SOURCEBASE=$sourcebase
> >    AC_SUBST(gl_SOURCEBASE)
> >
> > in the configure script and then using this variable in the snippets
> > where you used @FILE@ above.
>
> There is a variable gl_source_base in the configure script, set at the
> beginning of gl_INIT. You can use it as a shell variable. But it is not
> (and cannot be) AC_SUBSTable.

I defined a separate variable because it needs to be either empty or 
$sourcebase/ (with the /) and I believe that the existing variable 
doesn't have the trailing slash.

Current patch attached.  Again, I only attempted to fix the module and 
m4 files that are needed by Octave.

jwe

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