Re: Serial number formats

[Bruno Haible]

Colin Watson wrote:
> How about the attached patch to autopoint which causes it to look
> through all m4 directories in ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS and compare serial
> numbers? That would avoid the problem of 'make dist' forgetting to ship
> files even if you do use multiple m4 directories; the files will simply
> not be copied into the package at all

It's a patch that makes it harder to use two different directories with
gettext.m4 in each. Is that clear to you?

It makes sense to look for gettext.m4 in all directories mentioned with -I
options, not just in the first one. But I don't like the idea of deciding
about where to put such a .m4 file on a file by file basis: this can lead
to situations where half of the gettext m4 files are in one directory and
the other half in another directory.

What do you think about changing 'autopoint' so that it first looks
in which directory (listed among the -I options) it has a copy of
'gettext.m4', and then put/update all gettext m4 files into this directory?

> > 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.
> 
> You can do this with aclocal's documented format too, since it permits
> and ignores any trailing garbage after the serial number itself.
> 
>   # serial 5 snprintf.m4

Putting a version number before the versioned item itself!? It's as if you had

  $ ls --version
  7.0 ls (GNU coreutils)

or

  $ uname -sr
  2.6.27 Linux

Note that the BSD people had such a convention, and abandoned it.

Bruno