Proposed rework of autotools call structure from port Makefiles

[Edwin Groothuis]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 05:51:41PM -0700, Ade Lovett wrote:
> 	http://people.FreeBSD.org/~ade/autotools.html

For people who don't understand the :env part of it, here is an
irc-log of it:

[Mavvie] ade: I don't understand the necessarity for the :env one, since it's only a configure phase issue and not a build phase issue.
[ade] well, I need to be able to differentiate somehow between
[Mavvie] or in other words, is there a reason why some ports need it during the configure phase.
[ade] USE_AUTOCONF_VER= 213
[ade] and WANT_AUTOCONF_VER=213
[ade] yes
[Mavvie] let me rephrase the question.
[ade] grep for just those two across ports/*/*/Makefile
[Mavvie] What is the reason why some ports need it during the build phase, but not during the configure phase?
[ade] poorly written configure scripts
[ade] and a lot of legacy
[Mavvie] will they break when it is there during the configure phase?
[ade] some software makes use of the tools, but patches 'configure'
[ade] other makes use of the tools, but patches (correctly) 'configure.in', which is then autoregenerated
[ade] yes, they break badly
[Mavvie] aha.
[Mavvie] so the best way would be to fix all files/patch-configures into files/patch-configure.ins
[ade] right.  which is a lot of ports.
[ade] ie: very unlikely to happen
[Mavvie] aha, okay now I get it.
* Mavvie just needs to be on the right track.
[ade] then you throw in automake
[ade] where now you're going configure.am -> configure.in -> configure :)

Edwin

-- 
Edwin Groothuis      |            Personal website: http://www.mavetju.org
edwin at mavetju.org    |          Weblog: http://weblog.barnet.com.au/edwin/