Hello, * Stefano Lattarini wrote on Thu, Nov 04, 2010 at 08:47:47PM CET: > I've gone ahead and documented this non-obvious limitation, and another > similar one regarding AC_DEFUN. See the attached patch. > > Ralf, ok to apply to maint?
There are a couple of things I don't like with the principle of this patch: hard-coding limitations in the testsuite, and hard-coding limitations and presenting them as such in the manual. The latter makes the project look bad, the other two are a maintenance hassle once and if the code is improved. We might even have to remove the section in the manual once aclocal is fixed (which is really bad because it means URLs to the per-node links to the manual will go bad). That said, I think it is prudent to document *requirements* of aclocal that the user of aclocal and authors of macro files must meet. But document them that way, and do it only if they can't be fixed. I'm still not totally sure why aclocal didn't try to use traces, but one reason I can think of is the following: macros from unrelated third-party packages may otherwise interfere with each other; but also, macros from different versions of the same third-party package might all be found in the aclocal search path. Can we please check history here before committing to anything? I cannot tell without experimenting (e.g., installing lots of *-dev distro packages on my box) whether this is a problem now, or would be a problem when tracing with the Autoconf-without-aclocal language (which is defined by Autoconf already) or with Gary's proposed new language. A problem to take into account is that if aclocal fails due to macro interaction for some user, she might not be able to do anything about it (because she is not root) thus making the whole installation a bit unusable. Thanks, Ralf > Document in detail some limitations of aclocal. > > * doc/automake.texi (Limitations of aclocal): New section. > * tests/aclocal-limit-defun.test: New test, checking that the > aclocal limitation(s) exposed in the newly added manual section > does really hold. > * tests/aclocal-limit-include.test: Likewise. > * tests/Makefile.am (TESTS): Updated. > * .gitignore: Updated. > * THANKS: Updated. > > From a report by Nick Bowler.