Serial number formats

[Colin Watson]

I've been running into problems trying to update man-db to current
gnulib, of the following form:

  configure.ac:335: warning: gl_ARGP was called before gl_LOCK_EARLY_BODY
  m4/lock.m4:29: gl_LOCK_EARLY_BODY is expanded from...
  m4/lock.m4:22: gl_LOCK_EARLY is expanded from...
  m4/lock.m4:253: gl_LOCK is expanded from...
  gnulib/m4/gnulib-comp.m4:40: gl_INIT is expanded from...
  configure.ac:335: the top level

I'm using both gettext and gnulib. In order to avoid confusing file
conflicts, I tell gettext to install into m4/ and gnulib to install into
gnulib/m4/, and rely on aclocal's documented serial number handling to
sort it out. I use '-I m4 -I gnulib/m4' in ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS since
autopoint installs into the first -I directory in ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS.

Unfortunately this doesn't actually work. Note above that m4/lock.m4 is
being used rather than gnulib/m4/lock.m4, which has a newer serial
number. Looking at aclocal, I see:

  my $serial_line_rx = '^#\s*serial\s+(\S*)';

The documentation of serial number lines in 'info automake' matches
this. Many files in gettext and gnulib have serial lines that do not
match this format; instead they have lines like this:

  # lock.m4 serial 10 (gettext-0.18)

The effect of this is that aclocal uses the first file with a given
basename it sees, which will be from the first directory in the include
path. Due to the autopoint logic mentioned above, this has to be m4
rather than gnulib/m4, and so gettext's macros always end up preferred
over gnulib's for me, regardless of serial numbers.

Could the "foo.m4" bit at the start of the serial line in these files
please be removed, or else moved after the serial number?

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden