Re: AC_REQUIRE problems

[Stepan Kasal]

Hi Paul.

On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 09:25:07AM -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Why not implement this stuff using "make" rather than "sh"?
> "make" is designed for dependency handling; the shell isn't.
> 
> (If that's too drastic for you, I suppose we could reimplement "make"
> in the shell.  :-)

Sure, I like declarative languages.  It might be even easier to use
then the macro language we use now.

But I don't understand your proposal: do you want to use make to generate
the shell script "configure"?

Or do you propose that make will be run as part of the ./configure call?
Shall we try to write portable makefiles, or shall we require GNU make
on target hosts?

Is make indeed suitable declarative language for this purpose?
Will we have a small file for each macro which was run, in order to tell
Makefile that it doesn't have to run it again?
Or will we write the results to a makefile, which will the make have to
re-read after each test?

I can imagine a good solution though:
as soon as our empiric resarch proves the hypothesis that /bin/sh has
functions, we can create a corresponding function for each AC_DEFUNd macro,
declare these functions near the beginning of the file, and use a shell
variable to witness whether the function was run or not.
Then AC_REQUIRE would simply look at the variable and run the function
if it is not set yet.
Actually, we don't have to wait until the hypothesis is proven, we can
implement it immediately, controllable by an option to autoconf.

But it might be much more work than my proposals,
        Stepan