Re: Improved 'Parsing' of configure.in

[Alexandre Oliva <oliva@dcc.unicamp.br>]

On Jun 20, 1999, Rich Paul <rich-paul@rich-paul.net> wrote:

> configure Makefile: configure.in Makefile.in

I hope you mean:

configure Makefile.in: configure.in Makefile.am

because automake must not be necessary for random installers.

Moreover, this rule breaks on parallel builds.  It would be better to
write:

configure: configure.in
        cd $(srcdir) && automake

Makefile.in: configure Makefile.am
        @if test ! -f Makefile.in; then \
            rm -f configure && $(MAKE) $@; \
        fi

> There would be no reason to run the autoconf script.

I.e., automake would run it implicitly, if I understand correctly
understand it.

Maybe it would be a better approach to keep autoconf, but run it
through some additional magic macros that add commented-out notes to
the configure script about which macros have been called or something
like that, then automake would just have to scan that configure
script.

> I suspect that a similar technique could be used to make aclocal
> unnessisary as a seperate program

We've already got plans to get rid of it, by means of the AC_INCLUDE
macro (not installed in autoconf yet)

-- 
Alexandre Oliva http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva IC-Unicamp, Bra[sz]il
{oliva,Alexandre.Oliva}@dcc.unicamp.br  aoliva@{acm.org,computer.org}
oliva@{gnu.org,kaffe.org,{egcs,sourceware}.cygnus.com,samba.org}
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