Stepan Kasal wrote:
> > . ./version.sh
> > AC_INIT(my package, ${myversion})
>
> this solution doesn't work, as AC_INIT expects that it's arguments are
> known when m4 runs (ie. when configure is created).
But this one works:
AC_INIT
AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR(foo.c)
. $srcdir/version.sh
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(my package, $VERSION_NUMBER)
> OTOH, I'm not sure why you need this.
I need it for three purposes:
1) In GNU gettext, I generate the man pages using help2man from programs.
The version number that the programs have becomes the version number in
the manpages. Initially automake provided no dependency information that
the programs should be rebuilt when the configure.ac file changes. So
before a release, after I changed the version number in configure.ac
and did "make", the manpages were rebuilt with the _previous_ version
number. So I changed the Makefiles so that all programs need to be
rebuilt when configure.ac or configure changes. You can imagine that
this hampers usual development...
2) In GNU gettext I would have to store the version number in three
different locations:
gettext/configure.ac
gettext/gettext-runtime/configure.ac
gettext/gettext-tools/configure.ac
This is against the "single source" principle.
3) In GNU clisp, we need the version number also for building the
infrastructure (such as documentation and Makefiles for exotic platforms),
a task that is performed in the source directory, not the build directory.
(When this task runs, there is no config.status anywhere.) So we
extracted the version number from the configure.ac using 'grep'. (Could
be using autom4te as well, doesn't matter.) So the version number ended
up being copied and transformed in various steps:
configure.ac --> configure --> config.status --> Makefile
configure.ac --> src/VERSION --> doc/impnotes.html
At some point this jungle of dependencies was missing a dependency
somewhere, and the dependency on configure.ac caused too many rebuilds.
It was just too much copying around of information that should be
centralized in a single place.
autoconf is made for putting platform/configuration dependent information
in many places. But for static information like a version number it is
more reliable to store it in a single place outside configure.ac.
> In your case, you would put the defines in a separate file, and include it
> like this
>
> m4_include([m4/version.m4])
> AC_INIT([gnumeric], [gnumeric_full_version],
> [http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=gnumeric])
This would work, but now I need 'm4' or 'autoconf --trace' to retrieve
the version number from version.m4. Which is not an improvement over
'grep'. A small shell script is more handsome.
Bruno
Bruno
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