Re: regex-0.12's regex.h seems to have a little bug

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 05:13:24PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> I think AC_LIBSOURCE probably is
> the right solution, but it would have been nice to introduce it after
> the autoconf/automake/libtool/m4 releases had happened. [...]
> Requiring modern tools for gnulib users is probably
> ok, but requiring unreleased cvs releases probably is not.
...
> Problem is, the new scheme causes real problems if you used AC_LIBOBJ
> or AC_REPLACE_FUNCS before, and put the LTLIBOBJ in another directory
> than the gnulib files.

when AC_LIBSOURCE was introduced, we all thought that this problem is
not big enough in practice.

Later on, when it was realized that a fix is needed, it was decided to wait
for Autoconf 2.60, instead of converting gnulib back to the old scheme and 
later again to the new one.

> Module maintainers always has to do the right thing.  This potential
> mistake is possible to detect through a script, so if this was a
> genuine problem in the old scheme, we could write that script.
> 
> > - with the new scheme you only add something like
> >     if test "$baz_works" != yes; then
> >             AC_LIBOBJ([baz])
> >     fi
> >   and it expands to AC_LIBSOURCE([baz.c]) which is traced by Automake.
> 
> This doesn't seem like a huge improvement.

Having information on one place instead of having it stored redundantly
is always good.  Script to check that the redundant description are consistent
is a kludge.

Stepan Kasal