On Mon, Jun 24, 2024, at 2:56 AM, Nick Bowler wrote:
> On 2024-06-23 22:23, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>> I'm thinking of making AC_RUN_LOG, which has existed forever but is
>> undocumented, an official documented macro ...
>
> Yes, please!
>
> I will note that Autoconf has a lot of "run and log a command" internal
> macros with various comments of the form "doesn't work well" suggesting
> that this is a hard feature to get right.
... Wow, this is a bigger mess than I thought last night. Up to bad
quotation in third party macros, however, I *think* almost all of it
is obsolete and can be scrapped. Stay tuned.
> I think at the same time it would be worth documenting the AS_LINENO
> functionality, which is the main internal functionality of these
> macros that (unless you just goes ahead and use it) Autoconf users
> can't really replicate in their own logging.
I believe what you mean is you want _AS_ECHO_LOG to be promoted to a
documented and supported macro, and for AS_LINENO_PUSH and AS_LINENO_POP
also to be documented for external use. Is this correct? Did I miss
any other internal macros that ought to be available for external
use? I don't think we should tell people to be using $as_lineno directly,
is there some use case for it that isn't covered by existing macros?
> If you implement this, please explain in the manual what "labeled with
> /label/" really means, otherwise I'm left wondering why this macro
> exists when we can almost as easily write something like:
>
> { echo label; cat file; } >&AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD
>
> Including example logfile output together with the example program
> might be sufficient.
Will do. The main point of the macro is that it does something a little
fancier than "cat file", so it's unambiguous where normal log output
resumes. Like the existing _AC_MSG_LOG_CONFTEST does:
configure: failed program was:
| /* confdefs.h */
| #define PACKAGE_NAME "lexlib-probe"
| #define PACKAGE_TARNAME "lexlib-probe"
| #define PACKAGE_VERSION "1"
| ... etc ...
configure: result: no
The "label" will go where _AC_MSG_LOG_CONFTEST prints "failed program was".
zw
