[Flac-dev] Re: 0.9 problems

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sun, May 20, 2001 at 08:33:20PM +0000, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

> Matt Zimmerman <mdz at debian.org> wrote:
> > In my opinion, the bug is that aclocal is failing when the required
> > macros are already defined in the current aclocal.m4.
> 
> But if you use non-standard macros, you are supposed to put them
> into acinclude.m4.  aclocal will refer to configure.in, acinclude.m4,
> and its config file directory for generating aclocal.m4.

The documentation for aclocal seems to say that it is intended to be used for
library-supplied macros, as well as those that come with automake.  If the
macros are stored in acinclude.m4 (or in an aclocal/ subdirectory), they will
have to be periodically updated to keep sync with the packages that supply
them.

<quote>
   This is mostly used for libraries which want to supply their own
Autoconf macros for use by other programs.  For instance the `gettext'
library supplies a macro `AM_GNU_GETTEXT' which should be used by any
package using `gettext'.  When the library is installed, it installs
this macro so that `aclocal' will find it.
</quote>

I agree that the current behavior is undesirable, but I think having aclocal
pull in the macros automatically is a good idea, at least for the maintainer.

-- 
 - mdz