Re: AC_INIT receiving PACKAGE_VERSION from outside

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005, Sam Steingold wrote:

> > * Stepan Kasal <address@hidden> [2005-03-11 09:48:42 +0100]:
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 01:13:47PM -0500, Sam Steingold wrote:
> > > Is there a way to keep the package version outside of
> > > configure.ac:AC_INIT?
> > ...
> > > . ./version.sh
> > > AC_INIT(my package, ${myversion})
> >
> > this solution doesn't work, as AC_INIT expects that it's arguments are
> > known when m4 runs (ie. when configure is created).
>
> so, it is impossible for configure to get the version information from
> outside, it must be hard coded in the shell script.
> why was this design decision made?
> I (and apparently at least two more other people) consider this
> behavior a bug, not a feature.
> Is there a chance this will be eventually fixed?

I also consider it to be horrendous to edit configure.ac simply to 
release a new package version.  For daily snapshot packages, the 
package "version" can change every day!  There should be no need to 
thrash in the version control system to simply insert a formatted 
date or some other versioning information.

By using the legacy AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE you can insert your own values:

# Source file containing package/library versioning information.
. ${srcdir}/version.sh

AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE($PACKAGE_NAME,"${PACKAGE_VERSION}${PACKAGE_VERSION_ADDENDUM}", 
' ')

In the above example, version.sh initializes a set of variables.  The 
package ChangeLog is inspected to obtain a reasonable date.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/