Re: autoreconf gets autopoint order wrong?

[Akim Demaille]

| I looked through the archives and the Gnats bugs but didn't see anything
| about this.  I'm using autoconf 2.54 / automake 1.7 / gettext 0.11.5.
| 
| My source tree contains no derived files at all; you must install the
| above tools before you can build from a CVS checkout.
| 
| By hand I need to run these tools to get the tree "ready to build":
| 
|   autopoint
|   aclocal -I config
|   autoheader
|   automake --add-missing
|   autoconf
|   ./configure
|   make update
| 
| ("make update" grabs public files from ftp.gnu.org, translation files,
| etc. using wget).
| 
| I was hoping that a single invocation of "autoreconf" would replace the
| first 5 lines above, but it does not work:
| 
|   $ autoreconf -i -s
|   aclocal: configure.in: 35: macro `AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION' not found in 
library
|   aclocal: configure.in: 36: macro `AM_GNU_GETTEXT' not found in library
|   autoreconf: aclocal failed with exit status: 1
| 
| After investigation it turns out that this fails because autoreconf
| tries to run aclocal first, instead of autopoint, and so all the gettext
| macros that autopoint will eventually install into my "config" directory
| are missing when aclocal runs.

aclocal is to be run twice: one first time to make sure all the macros
that might be used are imported, so that, for instance, if you use
PDS_USUAL_STUFF which includes an invocation of AM_GNU_GETTEXT, or
AC_PROG_LIBTOOL etc. be found.

The second run is to make sure that if new macros very imported, then
we proceed with the right aclocal.m4.  All this is written in the code.

| So, for now autoreconf is not helpful to me.  I wonder if the order in
| which these things are done could be changed so autopoint is done first
| rather than second?

The problem is that we are using recipees that different from tool to
tool.  Since autopoint still just greps configure.ac to see if
AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION is used, autoreconf can do the same.  So I
would suggest having autoreconf to grep AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION
configure.ac after the first aclocal run.