Re: generating pc file

[David A. Wheeler]

I said:
> > 2. If the GNU standards stay as-is, the autotools need to make this easy to 
> > do,

Bruce Korb:
> 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@" \
> [...]
> 
...
> Anyway, usage of WHATEVERINAMEDIT is quite straight forward:
> 
>    $(WHATEVERINAMEDIT) $(SHELL) script-du-jour

I don't think that is "easy to do" at all, compared to the simplicity of the 
task.  That's a bunch of lines already, and even then it omits the code for 
script-du-jour, which would add more code.

Creating files with substitutions at build time should require exactly ONE 
simple line in .ac or .am to list the files to be generated.  Anything more 
than one line, like the above, is overly complicated for such a common and 
trivial task.  As a *practical* matter, this means that currently developers 
have only 2 reasonable choices for this common case: AC_CONFIG_FILES (wrong but 
works) and AX_CREATE_PKGCONFIG_INFO (less wrong and works).

I'll accept invoking a predefined macro as being "one simple line" from the 
user's point of view, so I'll continue to recommend AX_CREATE_PKGCONFIG_INFO in 
my tutorial materials until someone comes up with something better.

I'd love to see an AC_CONFIG_FILES_BUILD_TIME([filelist...])  or some such.  I 
don't have the time to write that right now, but hopefully you see what I think 
is wrong with the current situation.  And maybe I can convince someone else to 
write it...!

--- David A. Wheeler