Hi Elia. Sorry, but I have to give my NAK to this patch. On 09/11/2013 04:46 PM, Elia Pinto wrote:
Git use, as many project that use autoconf, private m4 macros. When not using automake, and just relying on autoconf, the macro files are not picked up by default. A possibility, as git do today, is to put the private m4 macro in the configure.ac file, so they will copied over the final configure when calling autoreconf(that call also autoconf). But this makes configure.ac difficult to read and maintain, especially if you want to introduce new macros later. By separating the definitions of the macros from configure.ac file the build system would be more modular.
In which sense are we being more modular exactly? After all: - the configure.ac of Git is the only user of these macros, - using m4_include doesn't offer any performance improvement, and - m4 doesn't offer any namespace granularity anyway. So it seems to me that this patch only adds extra indirections without adding any real benefit.
Starting from version 2.58, autoconf provide the macro AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR to declare where additional macro files are to be put and found by aclocal. The argument passed to this macro is commonly m4. Despite the documentation, autoconf do nothing with it, only aclocal can use directly if invoked by -I m4 or indirectly using automake. But autoreconf don't invoke aclocal in this way. So in summary you can not use this macro in a useful way if you only use autoconf, as git does. Another historical possibility is to list all your macros in acinclude.m4. This file will be included in aclocal.m4 when you run aclocal, and its macro(s) will henceforth be visible to autoconf. However if it contains numerous macros, it will rapidly become difficult to maintain, and for git this don't provide any benefits or very little. The actual autotool documentation recommend to write each macro in its own file and gather all these files in a separate directory.
Where exactly id you find that recommendation? If the autotools docs tell to do so *unconditionally*, they are wrong and should be fixed. In fact, even the configure.ac from Automake itself keeps definition of private macros in configure.ac...
Given the limitations i mentioned earlier, the only possibility is to use the m4_include for including every macro file. The m4_include directive works quite like the #include directive of the C programming language, and simply copies over the content of the file(s). Signed-off-by: Elia Pinto <gitter.spiros@xxxxxxxxx> --- This is a second version of this patch http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/231984. The first was plain wrong, my bad. I am sorry for the long delay. Sure it is something low-hanging fruit configure.ac | 148 +++---------------------------------- m4/git_arg_set_path.m4 | 14 ++++ m4/git_check_func.m4 | 13 ++++ m4/git_conf_append_path.m4 | 30 ++++++++ m4/git_conf_subst.m4 | 10 +++ m4/git_conf_subst_init.m4 | 15 ++++ m4/git_parse_with.m4 | 22 ++++++ m4/git_parse_with_set_make_var.m4 | 20 +++++ m4/git_stash_flags.m4 | 15 ++++ m4/git_unstash_flags.m4 | 13 ++++ 10 files changed, 162 insertions(+), 138 deletions(-) create mode 100644 m4/git_arg_set_path.m4 create mode 100644 m4/git_check_func.m4 create mode 100644 m4/git_conf_append_path.m4 create mode 100644 m4/git_conf_subst.m4 create mode 100644 m4/git_conf_subst_init.m4 create mode 100644 m4/git_parse_with.m4 create mode 100644 m4/git_parse_with_set_make_var.m4 create mode 100644 m4/git_stash_flags.m4 create mode 100644 m4/git_unstash_flags.m4
> [SNIP] > Regards, Stefano -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html