Re: [libvirt] [PATCH] autogen: allow aclocal to receive arguments via an environment variable

[Eric Blake]

[moving to bug-gnulib]

On 09/19/2010 01:21 AM, Justin Clift wrote:
> On Mac OS X, the "Homebrew" build system (one of the three main ones)
> has its m4 macro directory placed in a user configurable location.
>
> This patch adds a simple way to pass this configuration information to
> aclocal, using an environment variable called ACLOCAL_FLAGS. This allows
> the packaging of libvirt into the Homebrew build system.
>
> ie:
>      $ export ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I /path/to/m4/macro/dir/"

Justin explained off-list to me that this matters for third-party 
macros, like pkg.m4 from pkg-config.

> ---
>
> Although this patch works, I'm kind of expecting Eric will have a better way
> of achieving what this is trying to do, so this will get NACKed.  No stress. :)
>
>   README-hacking |    6 ++++++
>   bootstrap      |    2 +-
>   2 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/README-hacking b/README-hacking
> index 80b022c..74f3bed 100644
> --- a/README-hacking
> +++ b/README-hacking
> @@ -33,6 +33,12 @@ reduce download time and disk space requirements:
>
>           $ export GNULIB_SRCDIR=/path/to/gnulib
>
> +Also, if you have M4 macro files (.m4) in a non-standard location,
> +you can include them in the build process with the ACLOCAL_FLAGS
> +environment variable:
> +
> +        $ export ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I /path/to/extra/macro/dir"
> +

Well, this part isn't (yet) relevant to gnulib, although we are 
gradually working towards unifying HACKING documents to have a 
consistent name and reusable content.

>   The next step is to get all required pieces from gnulib,
>   to run autoreconf, and to invoke ./configure:
>
> diff --git a/bootstrap b/bootstrap
> index 2422549..593e0b2 100755
> --- a/bootstrap
> +++ b/bootstrap
> @@ -775,7 +775,7 @@ grep -E '^[  ]*AC_CONFIG_HEADERS?\>' configure.ac>/dev/null 
> ||
>
>   for command in \
>     libtool \
> -  "${ACLOCAL-aclocal} --force -I m4" \
> +  "${ACLOCAL-aclocal} --force -I m4 ${ACLOCAL_FLAGS}" \

At first glance, this actually looks reasonable to me.  Anyone else have 
any comments or ideas for a better approach?

--
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org