Re: Cleanup initialization of configure process (issue 549350043 by address@hidden)

[Carl Sorensen]

What documentation says AC_INIT should be called with constant arguments?

Quoting from 
https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.67/html_node/Initializing-configure.html

"The arguments of AC_INIT must be static, i.e., there should not be any shell 
computation, quotes, or newlines, but they can be computed by M4. This is 
because the package information strings are expanded at M4 time into several 
contexts, and must give the same text at shell time whether used in 
single-quoted strings, double-quoted strings, quoted here-documents, or 
unquoted here-documents. It is permissible to use m4_esyscmd or m4_esyscmd_s 
for computing a version string that changes with every commit to a version 
control system (in fact, Autoconf does just that, for all builds of the 
development tree made between releases)."

This says to me that it is perfectly permissible to use m4_esyscmd to get a 
version string.  And having all our version information in one place and one 
place only seems to be to be a good strategy.

Carl

On 1/8/20, 12:49 PM, "address@hidden" <address@hidden> wrote:

    On 2020/01/08 19:40:06, c_sorensen wrote:
    > How about
    
    > AC_INIT([LilyPond],m4_esyscmd(echo `VERSION.AC'))
    
    > The documentation says it is permissible to use m4_esyscmd as part of
    the
    > package information strings in AC_INIT.
    
    > Carl
    
    Not quite, but a variation seems to work. However I find this so ugly
    that I'm not willing to pursue this direction. The documentation says
    AC_INIT should be called with constant arguments, and we're again trying
    to find ways around it :-(
    
    https://codereview.appspot.com/549350043/