Re: --with and --enable to give paths

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Reuben Thomas <address@hidden> wrote:
> Ah, I was thinking in terms of the sort of macros in autoconf-archive,
> but this would be a project-specific macro. (At least, I presume so,
> as it would need to know about the targets in the project.) Hence I'm
> thinking that this reservation doesn't apply so much to
> autoconf-archive; please correct me if I'm wrong.

No, the macro would be generic -- AC_FOO_LIB should put the relevant
info about FOO in various FOO-related variables: $FOO_LIBS,
$FOO_LDFLAGS, $FOO_CPPFLAGS, $FOO_CFLAGS, $FOO_FEATURES, $FOO_DATADIR,
$FOO_HAS_BAR.  It's then up to the caller to use that info as
appropriate . Maybe:

AC_FOO_LIB
LIBS="$FOO_LIBS $LIBS"
LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS $FOO_LDFLAGS"
etc.

or

AC_FOO_LIB
AC_SUBST([FOO_LIBS])
AC_SUBST([FOO_LDFLAGS])
etc.

What I see in far too many macros, both in the archive and in autoconf
itself, is a presumption of a particular way of using FOO, which
doesn't fit all projects.

> I suggest you mention this on address@hidden, as it does indeed
> suggest that some elaboration, at least, of the GNU Coding Standards
> is needed.

That's a good idea.

Dustin

-- 
Open Source Storage Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com