Dear all, I am one of the maintainers of Coccinelle[1], a tool written in the Objective Caml[2] language. The tool is distributed with the libraries it depends on (they are provided as bundles). For each dependency, coccinelle's configure script checks whether the library is already installed. If not, the system is prepared to use the bundled version. Then when one runs make, all the bundles that are required are uncompressed, configure is called for them and they are built, afterwards the tool itself is built. This approach does not seem very satisfactory to me. For a start, I find it cumbersome to provide the dependencies as bundles but I'm not the person making the decisions. However, any opinion or pointer about software bundling their dependencies, pros and cons and the techniques used to do so would be warmly appreciated. Then, assuming we continue to bundle the dependencies, it seems to me that it would be more coherent to have the configure script of each required bundle run by the tool's main configure script. I am aware of the AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS macro, but this seems a bit limited to me. For instance it means that the sub-package's configure may find a different compiler to use than the one found by the main conigure, which is not good. One other issue is that we bundle the dependencies as .tar.gz archives and we would like to be able to extract the archives only for those dependencies that will really be needed (because they are not already installed on the system). Can this be achieved somehow with autoconf? Thanks a lot for any feedback! Sébastien. _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
