Re: bootstrapping CVS libtool

[Scott James Remnant]

On Wed, 2003-11-26 at 11:41, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:

> Scott James Remnant wrote:
> | This means if you use AC_FOO in m4/libtool.m4 then the first file that
> | happens to AC_DEFUN that will get included, even though it's defined
> | with m4_define in that same file.
> 
> Gah!  That has got to be a bug!!  Otherwise libtool.m4 will be slowly crushed
> under the weight of its old releases.
> 
It stops us changing our AC_DEFUNs to m4_defines, yes.  It wouldn't stop
us removing old macros, because we'd remove the calls to them too one
hopes.

> A better algorithm would be to use an existing AC_FOO macro (howsoever it is
> defined) in preference to pulling in a new file of macros and all of its
> dependencies?
> 
The problem is that aclocal doesn't know about m4_define, yes.

> | So in summary, to stop this madness, we need to either change the
> | definition of the above macro list from m4_define to AC_DEFUN or rename
> | the macros and then restore the definition of AC_PROG_EGREP even if it's
> | just a hack like this:
> 
> I have been wanting to split libtool.m4 up into several files for a while to
> help maintenance, and maybe reduce the size of aclocal.m4 for some of our
> users.  Now that libtoolize installs libtool.m4 and ltdl.m4 if they are used,
> the trick might be to only show aclocal the local (libtoolize installed)
> libtool macros.  I think we should:
> 
> ~  1: remove $prefix/share/aclocal/l(ibtoo|td)l.m4 of old releases at install
> ~     time
> ~  2: keep copies of the latest versions only in $prefix/share/libtool/m4
> ~  3: maybe we need a new $prefix/share/aclocal/ltcompat.m4 with stubs for
> ~     the macros you list above to keep aclocal happy?
> 
We wouldn't need the stubs if aclocal could only see one libtool.m4.

Yet again I wish that Autoconf would learn how to keep its own macros in
order, and didn't need a tool from Automake to do it for it!  The true
way to fix this is to add AC_MACRO_DIR to Autoconf, and allow it to
source files in that directory the same way it does its own macro
library.  No more stuffing everything in aclocal.m4.  But I digress.

Scott
-- 
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen?  Are you going round the twist?

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