I am working on a packaging / publishing system [1]
based loosely on gnu tools (though it runs on non-gnu systems too).
It's primary feature is that you can install packages from
source in to a subdirectory. As a generally rule, this works
nearly flawlessly, thanks principally to automake,
except for aclocal problems. The biggest problem is:
- the package has to live in a subdirectory, so
`aclocal' with no arguments will surely miss the package's m4 files.
But with the appropriate aclocal flags e.g. `-I /whatever/share/aclocal'
if the user happens to have that package installed on the system
(eg they have a /usr/share/aclocal/glib.m4
and /whatever/share/aclocal/glib.m4) then aclocal doesn't
produce any output, b/c of l.390 of aclocal:
elsif ($map{$1} ne 'acinclude.m4' || $file eq 'acinclude.m4')
{
warn "aclocal: $file: $.: duplicated macro \`$1'\n";
! $exit_status = 1;
}
I propose adding a --force flag to aclocal, then
! $exit_status = 1 unless $force;
Shall i make a patch to that effect?
- dave
[1] http://wigwam.sourceforge.net/
