Re: nested packages

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Bob,

* Bob Rossi wrote on Wed, Apr 12, 2006 at 03:42:51AM CEST:
> 
> I have 2 projects, CGDB and libgdbmi. CGDB depends on libgdbmi. I would
> like to make libgdbmi an autoconf package so that other people can
> benefit from it.
> 
> Is there a nice way to have CGDB's package use libgdbmi's package as if
> it were all 1 package? I would like to avoid having to run ./configure
> twice for the installation of CGDB.

Eliminating the second configure run is sometimes possible, but for
non-trivial setups there are many traps to run into.  We did this
exercise with libltdl in CVS Libtool, and it took several months to
stabilize (and Libtool 2.0 still isn't out, but for unrelated reasons).

> I would like to include them both in the same CVS repository and make 
> separate releases of the packages.

Well, if you want to be able to do separate releases, then you should
keep that second configure script.  With caching, the runtime overhead
won't be so much.

> Any advice? I could be persuaded to do things differently.

To keep space overhead (file duplication and such) low, keep all your
Autoconf macro files in the directory specified by AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR.
With Automake-1.10, it will be easier to share both that and the other
auxiliary files in AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR (right now if you point the outer
into the inner package, `make dist' may not do what you want).

Cheers,
Ralf