autohackery and nightly snapshots

[Neil Jerram]

I finally got to the bottom of all the gettext, config.rpath, m4 and
automake nonsense that's been turning my brain to mush.  As a result,
I'm happy to report that the 1.8 snapshot is now building again, and
the HEAD snapshot is getting a lot further than it has for the last
few months.

For anyone interested...

- The automake/m4 tracing problem that complains incorrectly about
  AM_INTL_SUBDIR being missing has in fact been fixed in m4.  I had
  installed a fixed m4 in /usr/local/bin, but autom4te hardcodes
  /usr/bin/m4 (even when autom4te is itself in /usr/local/bin), so
  wasn't getting the fix.

  The solution for this is either to have a fixed m4 in /usr/bin, or
  to "export M4=/usr/local/bin/m4" before running ./autogen.sh.  Then
  the dummy definition of AM_INTL_SUBDIR in acinclude.m4 isn't needed
  (and so I've backed this out).

- config.rpath is required at autogen time, so long as the installed
  gettext is recent enough.  Older gettexts (such as on the nightly
  snapshot machine) do not enforce this, so the build on such machines
  goes past this check and appears to succeed.

  So config.rpath should be in CVS, and now is in 1.8 and HEAD branches.

- config.rpath does not need to be listed in EXTRA_DIST, however.
  So long as config.rpath is present, automake includes it in
  DIST_COMMON, which means it gets into the distribution.

(The HEAD snapshot is now failing on i18n.test when doing a "make
distcheck", because of a (load-extension "libguile-i18n-v-0" ...) call
not being able to find the library.  I suspect the solution is this:

--- pre-inst-guile.in   17 Apr 2006 00:18:11 -0000      1.8
+++ pre-inst-guile.in   21 Feb 2007 21:31:16 -0000
@@ -43,7 +43,7 @@
 # Code:
 
 # config
-subdirs_with_ltlibs="srfi guile-readline"       # maintain me
+subdirs_with_ltlibs="srfi guile-readline libguile"       # maintain me
 
 # env (set by configure)
 top_srcdir="@top_srcdir_absolute@"

but I'm still investigating.)

Regards,
     Neil