Re: Cleaning up libtool.m4, ltdl.m4 and configure.ac

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Dalibor,

* Dalibor Topic wrote on Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 12:51:00PM CEST:
> 
> On a side note, would there be some interest in patches cleaning up 
> libtool.m4 / ltdl.m4 for autoconf 2.59 warnings? I run the latest 
> released autotools with -Wall in kaffe's developers/autgen.sh script, 
> and a lot of the pages and pages of warnigns for deprecated autoconf 
> constructs come from libtool.m4. :(

We advertise Autoconf-2.50 and Automake-1.4 compatibility within
branch-1-5.  branch-2-0 does not do that any more, neither has it (most
of) your warnings.  IIRC there was only one left and it could only be
solved with CVS autoconf, not sure ATM.

> Unfortunately, while it is possible to simply autoupdate configure.ac 
> and ltdl.m4 (by calling it configure.ac) [1], it is not possible to 
> autoupdate libtool.m4 as the hacks around the lack of support for the 
> java language in autoconf seem to whack autoupdate into some endless m4 
> loop. Well, at least 17 h long loop that I chose to terminate this 
> morning :)

This is a bug.  Could you please post a recipe to reproduce it so we may
at least find out which tool (M4, Autoconf, Automake, Libtool) is buggy?

> My amateur suggestion would be to try to split libtool.m4 into several 
> m4 files, like gettext does it for their m4 macros. That would make 
> autoupdating parts of it at least feasible.

FWIW, branch-1-5 is not supposed to receive anything but bug fixes.
The definition of what constitues a bug fix is being bent ways at times,
but if you ask me, no such reordering should take place, be it only
because then we'd have to increase libtool.m4's serial which then made
the universe collapse because our serial numbering would break.  :->

Please look at branch-2-0 or even HEAD if you consider involved changes.
Also, please note that the very reason I work on bugs against branch-1-5
is that many of them turn out to be present in the other branches as well.

Regards,
Ralf