Re: autotest/package.m4 question [PATCH]

[William Pursell]

Eric Blake wrote:
> According to William Pursell on 10/13/2008 1:06 AM:

> > Thirdly, is there any standard way to take a file
> > foo.c and generate an autoconfiscated tree structure?
>
> Not that I know of.  What tree structure are you proposing?

I suspect that would be a contentious issue.  Personally,
I like a recursive build with src/foo.c and tests/foo-test.c.
Maybe starting new projects is rare enough (only occurs
once in the life of a project) that there's no need
for such a script.  Also, once a project has grown
to any significant state, automating the conversion
is difficult if not impossible, but there is a *lot*
of resistance to the autotools in general, and it
takes a lot of trial and error and reading before
one realizes that it's fairly easy to start a new
project.

It seems like it would be a good marketing move if
it were easy to start.  eg, instead of requiring the
would be project developer to do:

mkdir hello;
cd hello;
mkdir src; mkdir tests;
echo "SUBDIRS = src tests" > Makefile.am
echo bin_PROGRAMS = hello > src/Makefile.am
echo check_PROGRAMS = hello > tests/Makefile.am
echo hello_SOURCES = '$(srcdir)/../src/hello.c' >> tests/Makefile.am
autoscan
mv configure.scan configure.ac
vi configure.ac
etc...

or to write their own script to do this, it would be
fantastic if the developer of a brand new implementation
of "Hello, World!" could write the initial hello.c
file and then use a script developed by those most
knowledgeable about the autotools to generate
a tree.

As I was writing this, I thought that the following
would be handy.  My perl is weak, and I'm sure there
is a much terser way to do this:

diff --git a/bin/autoscan.in b/bin/autoscan.in
index 18d9ac1..064d2a3 100644
--- a/bin/autoscan.in
+++ b/bin/autoscan.in
@@ -528,7 +528,15 @@ sub output ($)
      "# Process this file with autoconf to produce a configure 
script.\n" .
      "\n" .
      "AC_PREREQ(address@hidden@])\n" .
-     "AC_INIT([FULL-PACKAGE-NAME], [VERSION], BUG-REPORT-ADDRESS])\n");
+     "AC_INIT([FULL-PACKAGE-NAME], [VERSION], ");
+  if (defined $ENV{EMAIL})
+    {
+      print $file "[$ENV{EMAIL}])\n";
+    }
+  else
+    {
+      print $file "[BUG-REPORT-ADDRESS])\n";
+    }
   if (defined $cfiles[0])
     {
       print $file "AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR([$cfiles[0]])\n";



--
William Pursell