Re: aclocal question (AM_ICONV)

[Bill Moseley]

At 01:37 PM 09/19/02 -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
>> From: Bill Moseley <address@hidden>
>> Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 00:13:31 -0700
>> 
>> I wanted to use the AM_ICONV macro which is in the gettext package in a
>> configure.in file.
>
>You're a brave man; not many people use that.
>
>Why do you need AM_ICONV?  Are you using iconv directly?

Yes, I want to use iconv directly.  Swish-e is an old ('94 or so) search
engine.  I'm now using libxml2 to parse HTML and XML, and it returns it in
UTF-8.  libxml2 has a function to convert to 8859-1 so I'm currently
converting all UTF-8 back to 8859-1.  Kludge.  Anyway, until we can support
UTF-8 internally the idea is to use iconv to allow people to encode into an
8-bit encoding of their choice.

>> I installed gettext, and the macros m4 were installed in
>> /usr/local/share/aclocal.
>
>It's a bad idea to rely on this, since it means that only you can
>configure your package.  I would put those .m4 files into an m4
>subdirectory of your package, and distribute those .m4 files.
>Then you can use aclocal -I m4.  Most people do it this eay.

Shows how little I know.  I thought the point of aclocal was to bring in
the macros into aclocal.m4 so that all others (that run autoconf) would
need was that aclocal.m4 file.  aclocal.m4 would be in cvs, but not in our
tarball (the tarball would have configure already created).

Thanks,

BTW -- the reasons for all these messages is that I'm trying to convert our
(working) configure based project to use automake and libtool.  Does
everyone find this a steep learning curve? ;)



-- 
Bill Moseley
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