Re: gettext/0.11.5 revision

[Bruno Haible]

On Saturday 23 November 2002 16:31, David Kaelbling wrote:
> Building gettext/0.11.5 there are a couple places where the Makefiles
> use explicit expansions when they could have used a local variable. 
> (For example using "@LTLIBICONV@" in libgettextlib_la_LDFLAGS instead of
> "$(LTLIBICONV)").  While this doesn't make any difference for normal
> builds, it does make customizing the builds a bit harder since you can't
> simply override 'LTLIBICONV="-all -liconv -notall"' in a wrapper
> Makefile.

The usual way to override autoconf results is by modifying config.status and
rerunning ./config.status. This way, it not only works in Makefiles that
use @VARIABLE@, it also works in Makefiles that are not generated through
automake (and where therefore $(VARIABLE) is not synonymous with @VARIABLE@),
and it works also for other files (sed scripts, header files etc.) into which
substitutions are made.

Overriding AC_SUBSTed variables through wrapper Makefiles is not the way
autoconf'ed things are meant to be used.

Thanks for the patch anyway.

Bruno