Re: please correct my ugly hack

[Dan Manthey]

On Wed, 1 Jun 2005, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-06-01 at 18:33 +0200, Stepan Kasal wrote:
>
> > I think the best solution is to drop caching from programs.m4.
> Only over my dead body ;-)
>
> > Caching was invented mainly for expensive tests which involve
> > calling a compiler, which can be really slow.
> No, caching had been invented for faster interaction of several
> configure scripts (CONFIG_SUBDIRS) in large source trees.

Can't you just `export PROG' in the root configure to pass the found
value to the sub-configures.  Sure, if you call the sub-configures
directly rather than via the root configure, they have to calculate the
program path themselves, but that hardly seems onerous, and Stepan is
certainly right that the cache behavior is weird.

By the way, note that there seems to be some confusion about whether a
PROG variable is "set".  `PROG=' does _not_ unset it.  How does
AC_CHECK_PROG behave when the variable is set to the empty string?

-Dan