Thread

1. On aclocal.m4

   Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> — 2000-06-10T18:09:36Z

   Just so you know what this aclocal.m4 thing is for: When you run autoconf
   it looks into this file for additional macro definitions. Several ways
   exist to provide additional macros: write them yourself, get them from an
   archive site, or use the ones provided by some program like libtool.
   
   To create aclocal.m4 you run the program aclocal. This scans configure.in
   and looks for all the macros that are undefined. It then looks around for
   definitions of these macros and copies them all into aclocal.m4. "Looks
   around" by default means places like /usr/share/aclocal, where things like
   libtool and automake leave their macros. When you write macros yourself
   you put them into a .m4 file and stick them (in our case) into config/ and
   then run `aclocal -I config'. As an analogy, you could think of all the
   *.m4 files as .c files and aclocal.m4 as a library, where aclocal is the
   linker.
   
   aclocal comes with automake as does the AM_PROG_MISSING macro that
   configure uses now. Note that this does not mean that anyone working on
   configure.in needs to have automake installed, only those that are adding
   external macro definitions. No, this wasn't my idea, this is the standard
   autoconf setup.
   
   -- 
   Peter Eisentraut                  Sernanders väg 10:115
   peter_e@gmx.net                   75262 Uppsala
   http://yi.org/peter-e/            Sweden
   
   
   

2. Re: On aclocal.m4

   Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> — 2000-06-12T15:14:48Z

   Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
   > aclocal comes with automake as does the AM_PROG_MISSING macro that
   > configure uses now. Note that this does not mean that anyone working on
   > configure.in needs to have automake installed, only those that are adding
   > external macro definitions.
   
   ... or editing existing ones to fix bugs ... in practice, as you push
   more of configure's functionality into macros (which I agree is nice
   from a readability standpoint) it will become almost impossible to work
   on configure without modifying config/*.m4.
   
   As things stood over the weekend, even just pulling from CVS required
   automake, since aclocal.m4 may or may not get a newer timestamp than
   the config/*.m4 files.  I temporarily diked out the toplevel make
   dependencies that tried to update aclocal.m4, but the issue needs
   discussion.
   
   I'd like to be convinced that automake is actually going to be a win
   for Postgres before we start requiring developers to have it.
   
   			regards, tom lane
   
   

3. Re: On aclocal.m4

   Peter Eisentraut <e99re41@docs.uu.se> — 2000-06-13T12:41:33Z

   On Mon, 12 Jun 2000, Tom Lane wrote:
   
   > As things stood over the weekend, even just pulling from CVS required
   > automake, since aclocal.m4 may or may not get a newer timestamp than
   > the config/*.m4 files.  I temporarily diked out the toplevel make
   > dependencies that tried to update aclocal.m4, but the issue needs
   > discussion.
   
   As I mentioned to you off-list, if it actually invoked aclocal when there
   was none, then that's a bug. Configure should put out a line `checking for
   working aclocal|autoconf... missing|found'.
   
   
   -- 
   Peter Eisentraut                  Sernanders väg 10:115
   peter_e@gmx.net                   75262 Uppsala
   http://yi.org/peter-e/            Sweden