Re: [gnulib-tool-py] Default values for some other variables

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Dmitriy,

> Thank you again for Directories page at wiki, it was very useful.

You're welcome. I thought such a write-up was the easiest way of giving
you the overview about the topic and explaining why the current directory
should not be changed (except for subprocesses) and why absolutizing all
directory and file names is not an advantage.

> However it is not clear
> from source and from wiki what are the default values for incobsolete,
> inc_cxx_tests, and similar variables. If I am right, if these variables
> were not set, they will be taken from "$destdir"/$m4base/gnulib-cache.m4
> file.

Yes. In line 925 it it is mentioned that 'incobsolete' is semantically
a boolean, with '' and 'true' being the possible values. In line 976,
the default value is false (''). In line 4321..4323 the values of
incobsolete and cached_incobsolete are combined as if through a boolean
OR operation. Which is also what the comment ("if specified either way")
says.

> it is still not absolutely clear
> what is the default value for $m4base. As gnulib-tool --help says, the
> default value is m4, so file by default has path './m4/gnulib-cache.m4'. Am
> I right?

Here it's more complicated. It depends on the mode. In mode '--import',
the default is 'm4' and we ignore any existing gnulib-cache.m4. Whereas
in modes '--add-import', '--remove-import', '--update', then in lines
6328..6408 gnulib-tool searches for the m4 directories using a number
of heuristics, and gives an error if there is an ambiguity.

Bruno