[tex-k] Re: Moving towards Autoconf-2.59

[Peter Breitenlohner]

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005, Peter Breitenlohner wrote:

> ..........
>
> Hi Olaf, Karl, Thomas, Sebastian,
>
> I'd really like to get this project under way, before the 
> web2c/teTeX/TeX-Live
> CVSs start to diverge too much from what is in the teTeX-3.0 tarball.
>
> Attached is a bunch of patches ..........

In the meantime I had some discussion with the automake people about the
fact that aclocal (from automake-1.9.4) sometimes chokes if configure.ac (or
configure.in) sinclude's other files, and I got this reply (automake/450):

     Thanks for the test case.  I'll look into this.

     Fixing your example is easy, though.  Simply rewrite
     sinclude([common.ac]) as MY_COMMON and define the contents
     of common.ac as the MY_COMMON macro.  Then run `aclocal -I .'
     (or wherever you put common.ac), and let it do the m4_include for you.
     There is almost no reason to do handwritten includes nowadays.

The last sentence is certainly true. There are in particular many different
sinclude's that could easily be converted into one parametrized m4 macro, e.g.
 	* all of libs/*/withenable.ac
 	* most of the libs/LIB/LIB.ac for LIB=t1lib, ncurses, libpng, zlib,
 	 gd, and freetype

Thus the patches I sent a few days ago are certainly not the ultimate truth.

The basic idea remains, however, unchanged:
(1) Enhance the current autoconf-2.13 (i.e., texk/etc/autoconf/)
such that the present configure.in, Makefile.in etc. still work with this
"V2.13-new".

(2) Add a directory with M4 macros for autoconf-2.59 (e.g., texk/m4/)

(3) Change configure.in, Makefile.in etc. such that they work with both
V2.13-new and V2.59.

The important point being that step (3) above can be done independently for
each configure.in together with its Makefile.in etc. (More precisely: can be
done in several little steps such that things work with V2.13-new after each
step and equally work with V2.59 after the last step.)

I would very much appreciate some (any) reaction from your side,
 	regards
 		Peter