On 8/5/20 2:35 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
This feels like a stupid question but I’ve been failing to find the answer all day. Is there a way for M4 code (specifically in autoconf/general.m4, if it matters) to tell which command-line tool (autoconf, autoheader, etc.) is being run?
Nothing obvious jumps out at me. Each command-line tool calls autom4te --language=XYZ, where the choice of language determines which other arguments are pre-loaded. Perhaps seeing if a particular witness macro is defined from a given language's presets is enough to deduce things, though? For example, the 'M4sugar' language is the base of the inheritance tree, so it is always loaded; the 'M4sh' language loads a definition of AS_INIT from m4sh.m4f (so if that macro is not defined, you are in m4sugar rather than m4sh); the 'Autotest' language loads autotest.m4f on top of M4sh (so seeing if AT_INIT is defined is a good witness); the 'Autoconf' language loads in autoconf.m4f on top of M4sh (so seeing if AC_INIT is defined is a good witness). On the other hand, autom4te doesn't have an 'Autoheader' language per se, but does define 'Autoheader-preselections', but that doesn't cause any extra files to be loaded or new macros to be defined, so offhand I don't see an easy witness to tell when autoheader is being run, and the autoheader binary calls autom4te --language=autoconf.
It might be an interesting idea to add support for a well-documented macro (probably at the m4sugar namespace) that can be queried to learn the current language, and then updating autom4te or each binary that calls autom4te to use -Dm4_language=XYZ to then make that macro be a reliable indicator of which language flavor is being run under autom4te. But given the difference in release cycles between autoconf and automake, that may still not help you in the short term for learning when automake is running things (other than seeing if AM_INIT is defined).
-- Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3226 Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org
