Re: [autoconf-archive-maintainers] Serial lines for Automake

[Francesco Salvestrini]

Hi,

On Friday 17 July 2009, Peter Simons wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Francesco brought up the subject of serial lines:
>  > "aclocal serial lines" (eg sect. 6.3.5 - automake1.10 info).
>
> Apparently, the idea is to add a version number in front of each macro:
>
>      # serial 1
>      AC_DEFUN([AX_THIRD_PARTY], [...])
>
> Git offers an easy way to determine a unique serial number: the number
> of commits that modified the macro. ACX_PTHREAD, for example, is at
> version 5:
>
>   git log acx_pthread.m4 | egrep -c "^commit [0-9af]+"
>   5
>
> Maybe those #serial lines could be generated and added automatically to
> each m4 file when compiling the distribution archive?

Yes, you got my point.

The serial line should appear in the file before any macro definition. In 
order to keep things simple we should put the serial line as first line in 
the file.

A git-pourcelain/git-hook approach could avoid running git-log + grep over 
more than 500 macros on each dist target run (the count get worse if the dist 
target fails ...).

We will need to keep the numbering scheme coherent, once it is stable: we 
shouldn't decrease a macro serial once it has been released ... we could lead  
into user related problems otherwise.

Thus a change in the scheme means bumping all serial numbers.

I think also that we must confine such changes (and the forthcoming ones, eg: 
namespace cleanup, obsolescence) in a different branch, in order to keep the 
mess bounded until the repository is stable again.

Best regards,
Francesco

> Take care,
> Peter



-- 
Boy, that crayon sure did hurt!