Re: Add more check in autoreconf

[Eric Blake]

On 08/16/2012 02:04 PM, Javier Jardón wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Im working on port GNOME moduels to use autoreconf instead our own
> tool, gnome-autogen [1] (they do almost the same,  but gnome-autogen
> was created before autoreconf exist)

A bit of research shows that you got some facts mixed up.

gnome-autogen.sh was created (as autogen.sh) in 2000:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-common/commit/macros2/autogen.sh?id=7d133ecfaf798c274fa0fb978364fe45771fa0ba

while autoreconf has existed since 1994:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/autoconf.git/commit/bin/autoreconf.in?id=cdf79c42edd28b4972535fdcc1160f402a6d6a29

> But now I have to stop, as some developers complain because
> gnome-autogen is still useful for us as it check for the presence of
> these packages:
> 
> - intltool [1]
> - gtk-doc [2]
> - yelp-tools [3]
> 
> (Almost all the GNOME modules depends at least on one of those)
> My question is if the check for these modules could be added to autoreconf.
> If yes, Id happry to start continue porting all the GNOME modules to
> the "upstream" tool

If you are willing to write patches to autoreconf to incorporate new
tools into the common autotools, then we will gladly review them.  But I
probably won't write those patches.  GNOME isn't the only project to
have an initial checkout script that wraps not only autoreconf but
several other tools; gnulib is a primary example of this, where many
gnulib clients (such as GNU coreutils) don't directly use autoreconf.
Note that many packages name their initial script 'bootstrap' rather
than a variant of 'autogen', so as to avoid confusion with the actual
'AutoGen' package.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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