Re: Site Macro Directory

[Mark D. Roth]

On Tue May 21 10:52 2002 -0500, Kenneth Pronovici wrote:
> I think it would work better to choose a scheme that would let a given
> autoconf user specify some list of site-wide directories for their
> own use, with the default being to use just the /usr/local/whatever
> directory specified at installation.  This makes the default case easy
> but provides some flexibility for use by people who don't administer
> their own box all of the time (like me). 

As I said in my last message, I can definitely see the value in having
a user-specified search path.  If there's a lot of interest in this,
I'll add this to my proposal.

Here's what it looks like now:

  * autoconf will continue to treat aclocal.m4 as a user-supplied
    input file, since there will probably always be a call for macros
    that are specific to a given package and not worth sharing.

  * In addition to aclocal.m4, autoconf will also read all m4 files in
    the `ac-package' subdirectory.  This will allow multiple macros to
    be distributed with the package without the need for combining
    them all into aclocal.m4.

  * autoconf will have an AC_SITE_INCLUDE macro that causes it to read
    a specific file from a directory outside of the source tree.  It
    will search all directories specified in the $AC_MACRO_PATH
    environment variable (if set), followed by the default site macro
    directory (set when autoconf is installed).  It will stop
    searching at the first matching file, which will allow individual
    users to override macros placed in the default site macro
    directory.

  * If the same macro is defined in both a package-specific macro file
    (i.e., aclocal.m4 and ac-package/*.m4) and in a site macro file
    that gets read by AC_SITE_INCLUDE, the version in the
    package-specific macro file takes precedence.

This covers the following bases:

  * aclocal can still be used to generate aclocal.m4 from
    acinclude.m4.

  * For those that don't want to distribute macros seperately, the
    `ac-package' subdirectory allows a copy of every macro used by the
    package to be distributed with the package, so people can modify
    configure.ac without needing to obtain the macros seperately.

  * For those that do want to distribute macros seperately, the site
    macro directory provides a simple, convenient way for autoconf to
    find locally installed macros.

  * Package-specific macros take precedence over site macros.

Other comments...?

-- 
Mark D. Roth <address@hidden>
http://www.feep.net/~roth/