Re: [PATCH 1/7] bootstrap: split into reusable parts.

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Chuck,

On 6 Nov 2011, at 00:23, Charles Wilson wrote:
> On 11/5/2011 12:40 PM, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
>> By the end of this particular set, libtoolize will have moved from the kludgy
>> sed based interrogation of configure.ac to probe the arguments to various
>> important macros so that it can determine what files to copy and where... to
>> the much more splendid and reliable M4 based tracing mechanism I originally
>> wrote for bootstrap last year before adoption into gnulib stalled.
> 
> IIUC, in the past libtoolize *itself* has not had any dependency on m4. 
> Granted, it wasn't much use without autoconf, which needed m4, so most users 
> of libtoolize would have had m4 installed anyway.  But this change will add a 
> *direct* dependency on m4, right?
> 
> That's ok with me, as it makes no *real* difference, but it should be 
> documented somewhere.

Good point.  And, actually, we do support the use of `libtoolize --subproject 
--ltdl'
into a non-Autotools parent project, so it would be nice if we didn't require 
GNU M4
in that case.  Luckily, moving to the $require_resource architecture in that 
area means
that we run the M4 scans lazily, so when there is no configure.ac to scan, 
execution
of the new extract-trace script (the real GNU M4 dependency) never happens.

Nonetheless, it would be nice if I didn't break that in a future update, so I've
added a new test to PATCH 3/7 from this series to do that... as well as a NEWS 
item:

  - GNU M4 is required to run libtoolize in a directory with a
    `configure.ac' (or `configure.in') that needs tracing to determine
    what modes and directories have been specified.

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)