Re: Using AM_CONDITIONAL in m4 macros

[Philipp Thomas]

* Nick Bowler (address@hidden) [20130118 17:17]:

> If the package author(s) provided a script to bootstrap the build
> system, then you should use that script.  Someone made the effort to
> write that script, and they presumably did not do so for no reason.

I have no idea why they originally wrote that script. Fact is it failed to
update the libtool configury correctly so that builing failed because of
libtool version mismatches. I had (wrongly) assumed that running autoreconf 
instead would get me quicker to a building package.

> You say that the provided script works, so that implies that a plain
> autoreconf is not the correct way to bootstrap this package.

That wasn't quite correct as I wrote above.

> If you think this is a bug or limitation in autoreconf, could you
> provide a small example package which demonstrates the problem?

ATM I have no time for dol an example package but the scenario I encounterd
goes something like this:


In file swig.m4:

AC_DEFUN([MLX_PROG_SWIG],[

   if test ! -z "$has_swig"; then
        SWIG_LIB=`$SWIG -swiglib`
        AM_CONDITIONAL(HAS_SWIG,[test 1])
   else
        AM_CONDITIONAL(HAS_SWIG,[test 0])
   fi

])

configure.in calls MLX_PROG_SWIG and Makefile.am contains

if HAS_SWIG

[...]

endif

And autoreconf complains that there is no AM_CONDITIONAL for HAS_SWIG unless
I directly m4_include swig.m4. Is that a suffient description?

Philipp