Re: [PATCH] support parallel installations

[Alexandre Duret-Lutz]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2004 at 12:04:07PM +0000, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
> [[...]]
> >>+* In order for this to work, Libtool's aclocal macros are not installed
> >>+  to a shared aclocal dir.  Either change your Makefile.am to use:
> >>+     ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I /usr/share/libtool-1.9g/m4

This path is system-dependent.  It's a mistake to hardcode it into
Makefile.am.  Please do not teach people to do that.

[...]
> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
[...]
> >Furthermore, I think only recent aclocal's read configure.ac
> >AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR (or there was some associated issue with that).

No version of aclocal does support AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR presently.  The
day aclocal does (I'd like this in Automake 1.10), it will not replace
an additional `-I m4'.  We have to wait for a new release of M4 that
is able to dynamically change its search path for this macro to be
completly useful.  Untill then, there should be no difference between
`-I m4' and `-I m4' + `AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4])'.

> >Furthermore, people might just not want to change their package merely
> >for using libtool.  There should be an easy way to get the default
> >installed libtool.  I'm not sure yet how to accomplish this.
>
> Well, if they want to use libtool-2.0, then they already have to change
> their configure.ac to use LT_INIT et. al, and I think it better to put
> the parallel install stuff in now so that they only have to change once.

I thought you had AU_DEFUN for the old syntax to work?

IMHO, it's unhealthy to make such change now, it has too many
implications and we probably don't realize all of them.  At least you
should keep a copy of the files in /usr/share/aclocal.  Remember that
you already tried to remove the m4 files from there earlier this year,
and it did break many setups.