Re: Why is srcdir passed as .

[Mo DeJong]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2000, Ben Woodard wrote:

> I am having a problem with my configure script where when configure is
> called for the subprojects a parameter --srcdir=. is passed into them
> when I just do configure. I expected that the srcdir would be ".." I
> dug around in aceneral.m4 and found that it is quite deliberate. Why
> is it done like this?
> 
> In autoconf 2.13, acgeneral.m4 line 2558 it has:
> 
>     case "$srcdir" in
>     .) # No --srcdir option.  We are building in place.
>       ac_sub_srcdir=$srcdir ;;
>     /*) # Absolute path.
>       ac_sub_srcdir=$srcdir/$ac_config_dir ;;
>     *) # Relative path.
>       ac_sub_srcdir=$ac_dots$srcdir/$ac_config_dir ;;
>     esac
> 
> I don't see why you special case out ".". When I cut out that special
> case. Things still seem to work. Is there some case that I'm not
> testing in which this would cause problems.
> 
> -ben


Good question. I have a bunch of configure scripts where
I have to do:

srcdir=`cd $srcdir ; pwd`

at the top of the file to get around problems created
by this special case. Because of it, I can not cd
to some dir and then cd back to $srcdir. Whats the deal?

Mo DeJong
Red Hat Inc