Re: really small nitpick

[Bruce Korb]

Laurence Darby wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm just starting to learn autotools, so far I've tried about 1/4 of
> 4 tutorials, without much success.  Then I RTFM, and overall it's
> surprisingly good :)
>
> Starting from scratch, I ran autoscan, but it gave an error message:
> autom4te: configure.ac: no such file or directory
> autoscan: /usr/bin/autom4te failed with exit status: 1
>
> It's not an actual problem since configure.scan is generated, but the
> error is annoying and unnecessary. 
>
> $ touch configure.ac && autoscan
>
> is nice, as the output shows what's going on and it's obvious what to
> do next.  So my nitpick is that I think the manual should mention to
> create an initial empty configure.ac before running autoscan, in part
> 3.2.

No.  Autoscan should:

  if test -f configure.ac
  then configure_file=configure.ac

  elif test -f configure.in
  then configure_file=configure.in

  else
     echo "NOTE: creating configure.ac file" >&2
     configure_file=configure.ac
     touch configure.ac
  fi

i.e. do the right thing and signal the user what is being done.
Eliminate extra unnecessary steps.  :)  Of course, that needs
to be translated into perl.  Thanks - Bruce