Re: [PATCH 1/6] Avoid that autom4te complains about unexpanded macros

[Eric Blake]

Paolo Bonzini <bonzini <at> gnu.org> writes:

> In the meanwhile, the series cleans up some problematic usages of
> M4sh, so the preliminary patches can be applied independently.

A disclaimer - while I am a maintainer of autoconf (and hence m4sh), I am only 
a contributor on libtool, and not the most prolific at that, so my reviews 
don't hold quite as much weight on this list as on autoconf-patches.  That 
said, I still think I'm qualified to chime in with concurrence, whether or not 
you wait for an additional reviewer.

> +++ b/libtoolize.m4sh
> @@ -1,5 +1,7 @@
> +m4_pattern_allow([dnl])

Forbidding dnl is a safety valve in m4sugar; by allowing it, you are no longer 
able to catch typos in future edits that accidentally overquote and leave raw 
dnl in the final output file.  On the other hand, I think libtoolize.m4sh is 
small enough to carefully audit (it is not like configure.ac, where catching 
errors in third-party macros is nice, since libtoolize doesn't really depend on 
third-party code).  And since libtoolize's job is to scan configure.ac 
(including ignoring dnl in configure.ac), there is a strong argument for having 
literal dnl in the output without having to add quadrigraphs everywhere.  So 
I'm okay with this patch as-is.

That said, it would be nicer if libtoolize could use autom4te --trace rather 
than sed scripts to learn some of what it scans from configure.ac, but that's 
unrelated to this patch series...

-- 
Eric Blake