Re: Serial number formats

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 01:14:33AM +0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > I would find it more elegant to install all the files separately and
> > have a defined ordering between them
> 
> It may work for you. For the general developer, I think it opens too
> many pitfalls (missing -I options, confusion about which file is used,
> possibly empty directories after "make distrib", ...).

I take the point about 'make dist', at least.

How about the attached patch to autopoint which causes it to look
through all m4 directories in ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS and compare serial
numbers? That would avoid the problem of 'make dist' forgetting to ship
files even if you do use multiple m4 directories; the files will simply
not be copied into the package at all, which surely makes it easier to
understand what's going on.

> > Beyond the gettext compatibility issue, there are many files in gnulib
> > that have serial lines in a format not recognised by aclocal that have
> > nothing to do with gettext. Is there a good reason for these?
> 
> The reason is transparency and ease of debugging: There are cases when
> 'aclocal' copies the contents of the .m4 file. When I have a configure file
> that does not work and look at the aclocal.m4 from which it was generated,
> I want to know from which .m4 file each snippet came from.

You can do this with aclocal's documented format too, since it permits
and ignores any trailing garbage after the serial number itself.

  # serial 5 snprintf.m4

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden

autopoint.compare-all-m4dirs.patch
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