Re: gnome-doc-utils, automake 1.9, and -Wno-portability

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 11:27 +0200, Stefan Kost wrote:
> Shaun McCance schrieb:
> > Ever since automake 1.9, automake has been spewing garbage like
> > this when you try to build any module that uses gnome-doc-utils:
> > 
> > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=507336
> 
> Does anyone know what a fix would be? What are the rules for "POSIX variable
> name"? Most hits I get when searching for that error tell that its becausem fo
> e.g. $(shell ...), but this isn't a variable name. Is the warning maybe crap and
> it should be filed as a bug to automake?

Basically, these "variables" are in fact function calls.  These
make functions are GNU extensions.  Options:

1) Completely rewrite gnome-doc-utils.make to not use these
functions.  Comment #3 shows a glimpse of what that would
involve.  But it only covers some of the easier cases.  I
don't have a lot of confidence I could get it completely
working.  And, of course, that is a *huge* change that
would need lots of testing.

2) Rodney indicated on IRC that this problem doesn't happen
for intltool, because it includes its bits using AC_SUBST.
He seems to think that if we used AC_SUBST_FILE instead of
doing an include, the warnings would disappear.  This looks
like a loophole to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if the
automake developers closed it off in a future version.
Note that, with this option, gnome-doc-utils will still
not work with non-GNU makes.  You just won't see warnings
telling you so.

3) Decide that we don't support non-GNU make, which we
already don't.

--
Shaun