Re: UPDATED -- Re: Okay to commit? PATCH to bonobo-activation -- adds glib-gettextizesupport and migrates configure.in to meet Gnome 2.0 Porting Guiderecommendations.

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm tredinnick org>]

On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 04:40:46PM -0800, Miles Lane wrote:
> After working with kevinv for quite a while, it became clear
> that something about using the new AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE syntax
> was causing the VERSION variable values to get lost.  So, after
> much trial and error, we decided to go with the old AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
> stuff, because it allows us to use the VERSION tracking approach
> from libgtop and bonobo-activation more or less unchanged.

It's probably necessary to do AC_SUBST(VERSION) and AC_SUBST(PACKAGE) if
you want them to be substituted in Makefile.am, etc. This is due to an
oddity in autoconf where it won't substitute variables that are only
mentioned in aclocal.m4 macros and not in configure.in. So although the
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE macro initialises PACKAGE and VERSION and you can
happily use them in configure.in, you will need to AC_SUBST them if you
want them visible elsewhere.

For what it's worth, I don't think requiring autoconf 2.5 is a mistake,
since the various portability fixes must make our life easier (for
example, you can now check that a header file is usable, rather than
just present, on the configuration machine). However, I do think it
should be up to the maintainers if/when they switch over and just
randomly patching modules is probably not the right approach (since the
algorithmic description in the porting guide works in general, but you
still need to engage /dev/brain to make sure all the details are right
in the specific package in question).

Malcolm

-- 
Why can't you be a non-conformist like everyone else?