Re: gnome-core bombs mightily

[Andrew Clausen <clausen alphalink com au>]

Owen Taylor wrote:

> Hmmmm. That's about the ugliest idea I've heard in a long
> time, but it does have a certain merit.
>
> First, though, it makes no sense at all when applied to
> packages that are mandatory, like GTK+, GLIB, and imlib -
> you can't build gnome-libs without them, so why should
> you be able to autoconf gnome-libs from CVS without them?
>
> Second, I hope people have noted, as previously, the
> problem that if aclocal finds duplicate macros, it bails
> out. So that means that if we do this, we can't install
> any of these .m4 files. Which would mean that _any_
> package (not just a package in gnome CVS) that wanted
> to use esd.m4 would have to include macros/esd.m4,
> and (if not in GNOME CVS) would run the risk of getting
> an old, outdated copy of those macros.
>
> So, as a prerequisite to using this solution at all,
> aclocal would have to be changed to just use the first
> copy of a macro it finds, instead of bailing out.

Would the first copy of an m4 file with the same name suffice?  You could
just pre-build a hash table of m4 files to be used (rather than traversing
directories), and eliminate duplicate m4 files from the hash.  Deciding
which copy to use might be more difficult - perhaps you could rank
directories.

Where can I find aclocal.in?  Is that also automagically generated?

Andrew Clausen