Re: Serial number formats

[Bruno Haible]

Colin Watson wrote:
> I would find it more elegant to install all the files separately and
> have a defined ordering between them

It may work for you. For the general developer, I think it opens too
many pitfalls (missing -I options, confusion about which file is used,
possibly empty directories after "make distrib", ...).

> you cannot use autoreconf and have to reinvent the wheel.

You can use 'env AUTOPOINT=true autoreconf'.

> > Therefore I would find it better if autopoint had an option that tells it
> > not to overwrite .m4 files installed by gnulib-tool, or if that behaviour
> > was even the default. What do you think?
> 
> This involves calling gnulib-tool before autopoint, not after it as the
> gnulib manual recommends.

Yes. When gettext 0.18 is released, this section of the gnulib manual can be
changed.

> Beyond the gettext compatibility issue, there are many files in gnulib
> that have serial lines in a format not recognised by aclocal that have
> nothing to do with gettext. Is there a good reason for these?

The reason is transparency and ease of debugging: There are cases when
'aclocal' copies the contents of the .m4 file. When I have a configure file
that does not work and look at the aclocal.m4 from which it was generated,
I want to know from which .m4 file each snippet came from. If the filename
is not mentioned, I sometimes have to search for a needle in a haystack:
  grep 'serial 54' /opt/share/aclocal*/*.m4
If the filename is mentioned, I can at least use 'locate' or 'find'.
Well, 'aclocal' could also do it by itself...

Bruno