Re: reporting full subdir path for subconfigure

[Karl Berry]

Hi folks,

    Paul> Hmm, it might make the lines rather long, 

Yes, it could, but I don't see any harm in this case.

    but on the other hand verbosity is not always bad.

Right.  It's just more information.  Anyone who wants quiet is already
(presumably) redirecting the output.

    What does the output look like now when configuring TeX Live?

For a structure like dir/subdir/subsubdir, it looks like this:

configuring in dir
...
configuring in subdir
...
configuring in subsubsubdir
...

    What would it look like after this change?

With my original proposed change, it would look like this:

configuring in dir (/foo/bar/dir)
...
configuring in subdir (/foo/bar/dir/subdir)
...
configuring in subsubdir (/foo/bar/dir/subdir/subsubdir)
...

Now that I write this, I think I'd also like to suggest outputting some
kind of marker before each "configuring" line, if there's a portable way
to do so, so that Emacs page commands can do something useful.  (There
are thousands of lines of output in my case and anything to help
navigate is a boon.)  I don't really care what, here are three
possibilities:

^L
configuring ...

--- configuring ...

=== configuring ...


    Would it be better to simply have this?
    AC_MSG_NOTICE([configuring in $srcdir/$ac_dir])

The actual ac_dir is still the most interesting thing, so hiding it at
the end of the long line seems suboptimal.  Most distributions are not
this complex and so the path is just extraneous.

    
    Ralf> With your proposal, the "notice" changes it's meaning from
    "subdir inside of builddir" to "subdir of srcdir".

So maybe a more precise wording is to remove the "in" which is there now:

configuring $ac_dir ($srcdir/$ac_dir)

    IMO, this is bogus, because you actually are running
    "$srcdir/$ac_dir/configure" to configure "$ac_dir"

The exact wording is not important to me.

The general thing that I would find useful is knowing the full path to
the directory being configured, as I explained in my original message.
And since configure is being run inside $srcdir, that means showing the
path in srcdir.


Thanks,
Karl