bug#9026: Supporting $ACLOCAL_PATH?

[Stefano Lattarini]

tags 9026 patch
thanks

On Friday 08 July 2011, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Hello,
>
Hi Ludovic, thanks for the report.

> On an FHS-style system, all macros are picked up from
> /usr/share/aclocal.  Conversely, on a Stow/Nix-style installation,
> macros are to be found in /foo/automake/share/aclocal,
> /bar/guile/share/aclocal, /baz/pkg-config/share/aclocal, etc.
> 
> It seems to me that the latter calls for user environment-specific
> settings, which an $ACLOCAL_PATH environment variable would handily
> support [0].
> 
> WDYT?
> 
> Bruno rightfully noted the importance of having a reproducible way of
> producing tarballs, and user-specific environment settings appear to go
> counter this goal.  However, there will always be a need for this kind
> of setting on Stow/Nix-style systems, AFAICS.
> 
> Thanks,
> Ludo’.
> 
> [0] In fact Nixpkgs/NixOS has a wrapper around ‘aclocal’ that does
>     exactly this (see
>     
> <https://svn.nixos.org/repos/nix/nixpkgs/trunk/pkgs/development/tools/misc/automake/builder.sh>.)
> 
 
JFTR, there's a pending patch series by Paolo Bonzini that introduces
exactly the feature you're requesting:
 <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake-patches/2010-11/msg00089.html>
I'm highly in favor of having the series applied to maint ASAP, but we
should wait for Ralf's ACK before doing that (and probably he won't be
avaiable this weekend).

Regards,
  Stefano