about the version number of the package

[Vincent Torri]

Hey,

I wanted to write an m4 macro to be put in a lot of our configure.ac 
files. The problem is that the code contain '$1' to compute the parts of 
the version of the package (major, minor, etc...). The code is the 
following:


VMAJ=`echo $PACKAGE_VERSION | awk -F. '{printf("%s", $1);}'`
VMIN=`echo $PACKAGE_VERSION | awk -F. '{printf("%s", $2);}'`
VMIC=`echo $PACKAGE_VERSION | awk -F. '{printf("%s", $3);}'`
SNAP=`echo $PACKAGE_VERSION | awk -F. '{printf("%s", $4);}'`
version_info=`expr $VMAJ + $VMIN`":$VMIC:$VMIN"

So, actually, my first question is: is there a better way to compute the 
major, etc.. parts of the version number ?

If not, how can I tell m4 to not expand $* in the printf command ?

thank you

Vincent Torri