Re: [hopefully fixed] Re: autogen.sh issues

[Craig Brozefsky <craig at red-bean dot com>]

Michael Livshin <mlivshin@bigfoot.com> writes:

> Craig Brozefsky <craig@red-bean.com> writes:
> 
> > The workaround would be to copy all he files in the acdir to some temp
> > dir, copy your qthreads and guile m4 files into it, and then invoke
> > aclocal with it's acdir set to the temp dir.  Rinse when done.
> 
> I've just commited a fix into the CVS that implements this idea
> (almost).  let's hope that it works.

I've tested it here without any hitches.

I still think we should submit a patch upstream to the automake people
making it behave like all good build tools should, letting definitions
in local files override definitions in dist files, perhaps with a
little hedz up.  What I think we should do and what we can do appear
to be seperated by a bottomless chasm of scripting hell.

The big problem is that presently aclocal works at the file level.  It
just concats files where it has seen macros that are needed, and does
not actually snag just the needed macros from a file.  We are looking
for macro level overrides, which means that not aclocal has to get
smart and be able to parse macro definitions, and even then it
wouldn't reliably be able to tell how much of a file needs to be
pulled in, because macros could depend on other defines and stuff in
their containing file.

That's not good hacker, that's not good.

Perhaps the only option is to just assume that colliding macros mean
interchangable files, and let the last one seen be the one that is
included.  Even that is cruddy tho.

If m4 is a brave little soldier, and let's macros be redefined and
shite, we could just concat the multiple files into aclocal.m4, making
sure that the ones in the -I included dirs go last.  That would also
depend on aclocal.m4 being considered opaque for most purposes, which
I think is the case.

-- 
Craig Brozefsky               <craig@red-bean.com>
Lisp Web Dev List  http://www.red-bean.com/lispweb
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