Re: Site Macro Directory

[Mark D. Roth]

On Wed May 22 21:40 2002 -0500, Mark D. Roth wrote:
> On Wed May 22 15:50 2002 -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> > My own reaction is positive, but I would suggest that you write up the
> > proposal, as a proposed patch to the manual.  (Often the documentation
> > is the hardest to write, so perhaps it'll be easier for you if you
> > implement it and then document it.  :-)
> 
> No problem.  I'll mail the documentation patch to the list when I have
> it done.

While working on this, I noticed that the current autom4te code
reverses the order of the `-I' options before passing them to m4.  The
documentation says:

  `--include=DIR'
  `-I DIR'
       Also look for input files in DIR.  Multiple invocations
       accumulate.  Contrary to M4 but in agreement with common sense,
       directories are browsed from last to first.

>From my perspective, this behavior is extremely counter-intuitive.
Every other tool that I know of that accepts a `-I' option (including
gcc, GNU make, GNU m4, and perl) prepends the arguments to the search
path in the order specified.  As a result, I was extremely surprised
to discover that autoconf does the reverse.

The current behavior seems to date back to revision 1.42 of
bin/autom4te.in from September 5th, 2001.  Can someone explain to me
why this change was made?  Thanks!

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