Re: Site Macro Directory

[Mark D. Roth]

Barring any further input from anyone, it seems like we've reached a
consensus on this proposal.  The final version is included below.

Paul or Akim, can one of you tell me how to procede with this?  Should
I submit a patch, or would you prefer to implement these changes
yourselves?

Thanks for the info!


On Tue May 21 19:07 2002 -0500, Mark D. Roth wrote:
> Here's what it looks like now:
> 
>   * autoconf will continue to treat aclocal.m4 as a user-supplied
>     input file, since there will probably always be a call for macros
>     that are specific to a given package and not worth sharing.
> 
>   * In addition to aclocal.m4, autoconf will also read all m4 files in
>     the `ac-package' subdirectory.  This will allow multiple macros to
>     be distributed with the package without the need for combining
>     them all into aclocal.m4.
> 
>   * autoconf will have an AC_SITE_INCLUDE macro that causes it to read
>     a specific file from a directory outside of the source tree.  It
>     will search all directories specified in the $AC_MACRO_PATH
>     environment variable (if set), followed by the default site macro
>     directory (set when autoconf is installed).  It will stop
>     searching at the first matching file, which will allow individual
>     users to override macros placed in the default site macro
>     directory.
> 
>   * If the same macro is defined in both a package-specific macro file
>     (i.e., aclocal.m4 and ac-package/*.m4) and in a site macro file
>     that gets read by AC_SITE_INCLUDE, the version in the
>     package-specific macro file takes precedence.
> 
> This covers the following bases:
> 
>   * aclocal can still be used to generate aclocal.m4 from
>     acinclude.m4.
> 
>   * For those that don't want to distribute macros seperately, the
>     `ac-package' subdirectory allows a copy of every macro used by the
>     package to be distributed with the package, so people can modify
>     configure.ac without needing to obtain the macros seperately.
> 
>   * For those that do want to distribute macros seperately, the site
>     macro directory provides a simple, convenient way for autoconf to
>     find locally installed macros.
> 
>   * Package-specific macros take precedence over site macros.

-- 
Mark D. Roth <address@hidden>
http://www.feep.net/~roth/