Re: aclocal.m4 location

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Sam,

* Sam Steingold wrote on Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 06:06:03PM CEST:
> automake requires aclocal.m4 to be present in the current directory.
> this is not the case for me, I have one master aclocal.m4 and a few
> subprojects, each with its own Makefile.am and configure.in.
> this means that for automake to run, I have to create a temp symlynk for
> aclocal.m4 and then the generated Makefile requires the symlink to be present
> (otherwise it calls automake which fails because aclocal.m4 is not in the
> current directory).

Hmm, that's not so easy, because aclocal, trying to optimize, puts only
those macros from the Automake package into the aclocal.m4 file which
are used for the Automake support in the current package.  So if one of
your subprojects needs another macro, it couldn't detect that, and your
configure script could not be generated correctly.

OTOH, aclocal.m4 files are typically not large any more if the macro
files they reference are in-tree (then they mostly contain a list of
m4_include()s for those files), so having a few of them around doesn't
hurt that much.

(Note that, if you are not using automake, then you can have a
hand-written aclocal.m4 file, and the above does not apply.)

> Would it be possible to add a command line option to automake to specify the
> location of the aclocal.m4?

Hmm, even having that (without the ability to share generated aclocal.m4
files between packages) could open at least a small can of worms, as a
few of the tools rely on the exact location of this file.  Haven't
checked in detail yet, though.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf