Re: generating pc file

[Bruce Korb]

On 09/21/12 11:14, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> 2. If the GNU standards stay as-is, the autotools need to make this easy to 
> do,

And that is easy to do.  Just bundle up the configured substitutions into a
macro a la adding this to Makefile.in:

  WHATEVERINAMEDIT = \
     prefix="@prefix@" \
[...]

Russ proposed a slightly different variation on that that amounted to the same
thing.  Another variation is to get the make program to just export environment
variables that correspond to the configured values.  I think that would be nice,
but you'd have to invent syntax to tell make "This is an exported value" because
that won't happen by default.

Anyway, usage of WHATEVERINAMEDIT is quite straight forward:

   $(WHATEVERINAMEDIT) $(SHELL) script-du-jour

and that script can be as trivial as a "cat" command reading from a here doc.