Akim Demaille wrote:
> Greg> One of the things that I find frustrating in 'autoconf' is that
> Greg> dependencies between configuration tests are not explicit.
>
> Alexandre> Aren't AC_REQUIRE and AC_BEFORE supposed to fulfill these
> Alexandre> needs?
>
> Yep, same here.
IMHO, AC_REQUIRE and AC_BEFORE are broken by design. Or at least,
their behavior is far too basic (notably the calling of the required macro
without any argument)to be satisfactory outside the scope of Autoconf's
internals. For instance, suggesting that a macro should be preferably called
before another is nice, but you should be able to *require* this also (no,
don't tell that me about --warnings=error ;-).
All of this could probably be implemented with a new set of macros
(pain with the macros names coming soon...). However, there is something that
I consider as a real bug in the current interface: if the macro A requires the
macro B, and the macro B is present in configure.in after A, A should not just
call B. It should abort at autoconf time and nicely ask the package writer to
switch the two calls.
--
/ / _ _ Didier Verna http://www.inf.enst.fr/~verna/
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