Re: Merge autoconf-archive into gnulib?

[Reuben Thomas]

On 5 September 2011 00:43, Bruno Haible <address@hidden> wrote:
> I think it
> would be useful to allow more projects of this kind to use the same
> tool for propagating the source code, namely gnulib-tool, extended
>  1. to allow multiple --local-dir options,
>  2. to allow fetching source code from git, hg, bzr, or svn servers,
>     or even from tarballs.

This is an attractive suggestion.

> If autoconf-archives macros have dependencies that so far have not
> been formally stated, then I would encourage them to adopt gnulib's
> module description format and hack gnulib-tool to collect the
> dependencies automatically.

I guess that would consist of parsing AC_REQUIRE lines.

Thanks for the examples of poor documentation and overlapping
functionality, which I'll chase up individually.

I see two obvious implementation strategies here:

1. Have a modified gnulib-tool for autoconf-archive, which parses
AC_REQUIRE lines and the listing of m4/*.m4 files to generate virtual
ax_foo modules and their inter-dependencies.

2. Use the actual gnulib-tool modified to support multiple --local-dir
options, and add an automatically-generated modules/ directory to
autoconf-archive to provide the data for it to work with.

(Option 2 is better for my money as it avoids forking gnulib-tool.)

How does this sound?

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