Re: [PATCH] Trace macros for aclocal options, deprecate ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS.

[Eric Blake]

[dropping bug-automake, adding autoconf]

On 10/11/2010 09:49 AM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> +++ b/ChangeLog
> @@ -1,3 +1,79 @@
> +2010-10-11  Stefano Lattarini  <address@hidden>
> +
> +       Trace macros for aclocal options, deprecate ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS.
> +       Maintaining ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS in Makefile.am to pass extra flags
> +       to aclocal is (and have always been) quite of an hack.  For
> +       example, autoreconf is forced to grep Makefile.am to honour
> +       those flags (which is a bad obsolescent behaviour -- in fact
> +       the autotools have moved consistently in the past years from
> +       custom grepping of Makefile.am and/or configure.ac to tracing
> +       of m4 macro calls, which is more consistent, more reliable and
> +       more flexible).  And when not using autoreconf, the developer
> +       is forced to add *by hand* the flags specified by ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS
> +       to the the aclocal calls not triggered by make rebuild rules --
> +       again more duplication and more chances for errors.
> +       Thus we now make aclocal trace some more macros, so that it can
> +       automatically find out extra flags from calls to those macros --
> +       for example, a call too AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([foodir]) will cause
> +       aclocal to add `-I foodir' to its flags.

I'm already liking this, just from the description.  Do we need to teach 
autoconf to trace some new macros?  I'd really like to get autoconf 
2.68.1 out the door this week with additional regression fixes that have 
been reported, and I'm wondering whether adding a few additional 
automake macros to trace during autoreconf are worth adding in that release.

> +       We also define two new maros, `AM_EXTRA_ACLOCAL_FLAGS' and
> +       `AM_ACLOCAL_FLAGS', whose only purpose is to allow setting of
> +       arbitrary aclocal flags in configure.ac.
> +       * NEWS: TODO!
> +       * doc/automake.texi: TODO!

Hopefully fixed before your final version of the patch.

--
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org