From: Marius Vollmer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 19 Mar 2000 11:54:44 +0100
Anyway, back to this specific workaround, I think it has a special
audience that might make me reconsider my position. they way I
understand the situation, it should help people most who want to
compile Guile from CVS, but are not really doing development on Guile.
I think we want to encourage people to compile from CVS because we
then don't have to release a tarball so often. [Do the nightly
snapshots still exists?]
this all depends on one's definition of "developer". some people like
to browse and build code, and sometimes they find ways to make things
better. perhaps they are not full-fledged developers, but i wouldn't
exclude those people from the development process. on the other hand, i
can see value in conventions; sometimes that is what binds a community.
(i don't know about the nightly snapshots...)
In that light, we should make it easy to compile from CVS. The next
question then is: how common is this automake/libtool problem? I
think it's quite common, it has happened to me on all platforms and
all projects. How hard is it to fix this problem without hacking
automake, libtool, or Guile? Not too hard, I'd say. You just need to
install automake and libtool with a common prefix and use them instead
of the old ones. I found that I had to do that in the end anyway,
because I don't want to depend on the versions installed by vendors.
Installation from source is very easy for both automake and libtool.
cool, i'm glad i did not offend you w/ my approach.
unfortunately, i still view prescribed prefixes w/ some trepidation. if
j.r.hacker wants to use different prefixes, we should not encode the
assumption otherwise in autogen.sh. because we (nor anyone) cannot
really mandate same prefix, it's reasonable to handle the worst-case
scenario (which is not a bug, simply a common situation) and be able to
grok w/ different prefixes.
basically, some assumptions are good to make, but this one doesn't smell
that way to me. (especially since i've stepped in the mud, personally.)
i suppose calling it a problem was improper of me; it's just another
Situation To Handle.
luckily here, there is no slippery slope. if we can reliably handle
different prefixes, that's as bad as it gets (unless i'm missing some
curious wrinkle...).
But I agree that it would be much more convenient when it would just
work. Therefore, your patch is probably the right thing, anyway. But
we should make sure that it is consistent. One thing I'm aware of is
that the "-I" options are only passed to aclocal when it is invoked
from autogen.sh, but not when invoked from make. We should probably
also set ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS in the relevant Makefile.am files. Could you
update your patch to do that?
sure.
In addition to this workaround, we shuld also be approaching the
autoconf/automake/libtool guys with this problem and ask for their
opinion. Maybe they have a superior solution that would help all
packages that use automake/libtool and not just Guile. Or maybe we
can help them develop one.
that's very constructive. even though i'm backing away from viewing it
as a problem, i'd still welcome insight from the original toolsmiths.
surely they have run across this situation before. i've nothing against
canonical, sanctioned, workarounds. :->
thi
