bug#13624: ACLOCAL_PATH documentation

[Stefano Lattarini]

severity 13624 minor
tags 13624 + moreinfo
thanks

On 02/04/2013 01:14 AM, Taylan Ulrich B. wrote:
> Good day,
> 
> The ACLOCAL_PATH environment-variable might benefit from better
> documentation.
>
This is a little vague.  What do you mean by "better documentation"?
Do you find specific passages unclear?  Is the documentation too short,
or too long-winded?

In any case, the best way towards a fix would probably be for you
to offer a patch with your proposed improvements.  I've found out
that active users of a feature are often better at documenting or
explaining it than developers of the same features are (and both
are usually better than I am :-)

> A mention in the short man-page would probably be best,
>
Consider that the man pages for aclocal and automake are just slightly
tweaked versions of the respective '--help' output of those programs,
and as such they should remain very short.

But if you want to attempt a patch to enhance the help screen to also
tell about ACLOCAL_PATH, and do so keeping it short ans sweet, you
might easily sway my decision ;-)

> since setting it is needed to get aclocal to work at all after
> installing it in a non-standard path like ~/usr.
>
This is not true; the only issue is that *third-party* m4 files
(those not provided by Automake itself) that are installed in the
aclocal directory of another aclocal installation (say, in
'/usr/share/aclocal') are not available by default to the new
aclocal installation.

> Also, should --print-ac-dir respect it?
>
No, because it just prints the *hard-coded* default directory where
aclocal looks for third-party macros:

<http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html#index-g_t_002d_002dprint_002dac_002ddir-273>

> Currently it doesn't.
> 
And this is by design.  Do you have a real use-case for wanting
'--print-ac-dir' to print all the directories that would be searched
by aclocal?  If yes, we might think of a new option for that (it
should pretty easy to implement).

Thanks,
  Stefano