proposed gnome-common changes

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

I've been working on some updates for gnome-common, and was wondering if 
anyone had any comments before I check them in.  The patch and 
discussion is attached to the following bug report:
   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=134207

The patch greatly reduces the complexity of how modules call the common 
autogen.sh script.  It does this by doing away with the support for a 
separate Gnome 1.x autogen script and macros.  Since in the 1.x days 
most modules were using CVS virtual includes to pull in the macros, I 
don't think anyone ever actually used this feature.  If it will cause 
you problems, please say so.

Here is a short summary of the changes:

   * removes gnome-deprecated-macros.m4 and curses.m4 since they were
     unused. (the last 4 uses of the deprecated, useless
     GNOME_PLATFORM_GNOME_2 macro were in a few of the accessibility
     modules, and have now been fixed).
   * Install the remaining macros directly in $(datadir)/aclocal
   * Install the gnome2 autogen script as $(bindir)/gnome-autogen.sh
     (before hand, this was a script that would decide whether to call
     the gnome1 or gnome2 autogen script based on the USE_GNOME2_MACROS
     environment variable).
   * Fix up GNOME_COMMON_INIT() so that it just AC_SUBST()'s
     ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS to '${ACLOCAL_FLAGS}'.  This makes sure that
     aclocal will be called with ${ACLOCAL_FLAGS} as arguments during
     rebuilds (which the old version was not guaranteeing).

I've been building Gnome with these changes for a week or so and haven't 
run into any problems, so am fairly confident that the changes won't 
break anything.  If it looks like it would cause problems for you, 
please speak up.

With the changes, it is possible to greatly simplify the module specific 
autogen.sh too.  A typical one might look like this:
---- Cut Here ----
#!/bin/sh
srcdir=`basename $0`
[ -z "$srcdir" ] && srcdir=.

PKG_NAME=mypackage
REQUIRED_AUTOMAKE_VERSION=1.7

if [ ! -f "$srcdir/somefile-that-is-only-in-mypackage" ]; then
 echo "$srcdir doesn't look like source directory for $PKG_NAME" >&2
 exit 1
fi

. gnome-autogen.sh
---- Cut Here ----

Alternatively, the last line can be replaced with the following:
   export srcdir PKG_NAME REQUIRED_AUTOMAKE_VERSION
   exec gnome-autogen.sh ${1+"$@"}

Of course, all the existing autogen.sh scripts still function correctly; 
they are just more complicated than they need to be.

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/