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Reverse AC_REQUIRE and AC_CHECK_TYPE changes?
From: |
Adam J. Richter |
Subject: |
Reverse AC_REQUIRE and AC_CHECK_TYPE changes? |
Date: |
Tue, 31 Jul 2001 06:03:35 -0700 |
Sorry if this message is a little out of place, but I
thought it might be a good idea for me to provide a little bit
of feedback from "the trenches" of having to port a bunch of
software to autoconf-2.52.
At the outset, let me say that I am very glad to see the
faster release cycle for autoconf these days. Thank you very much
for that. I would much rather put up with the changes that I'm about
to gripe about than have to wait a long time between releases and see
other programs shipped that depended on unreleased versions of autoconf,
as happened with fileutils-4.0, for example.
Anyhow, my feedback is fairly simple: there are two changes
that I keep bumping into that tend to make a lot of work, and I
don't get the sense from the autoconf.info file that they were
really all that necessary:
1. AC_REQUIRE cannot be called from top level.
Now I have to write lots of little macros like:
AC_DEFUN(REQUIRE_FOO,[AC_REQUIRE(FOO)]);
AC_REQUIRE_FOO
Calling AC_REQUIRE from the top level is extremely useful,
especially when you are dealing with a bunch of macros whose
from external packages that have definitions that are constantly
being changed, so you cannot always be certain that a particular
macro has been called. I don't understand why you need to be
inside of an AC_DEFUN now for this. Is it an m4 diversion issue?
2. New AC_CHECK_TYPE format.
In practice, programs use many more "fallback" type names
as the second parameter to AC_CHECK_TYPE, which the new code fails
to detect. The "old" format also make for much more readable
configure.in files. Can't we just put the new format in a separate
AC_CHECK_TYPE_NEW() macro? It would do a lot for backward
compatability. A second best solution, which would not maintain
backward compatability, would be to make a public interface
AC_CHECK_TYPE_OLD.
Anyhow, I don't mean to start a flame war about this. I just
want to to report my experiences with autoconf-2.5x, which you can
consider or ignore as you see fit.
Adam J. Richter __ ______________ 4880 Stevens Creek Blvd, Suite 104
address@hidden \ / San Jose, California 95129-1034
+1 408 261-6630 | g g d r a s i l United States of America
fax +1 408 261-6631 "Free Software For The Rest Of Us."
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