| On Wed May 22 21:40 2002 -0500, Mark D. Roth wrote: | > On Wed May 22 15:50 2002 -0700, Paul Eggert wrote: | > > My own reaction is positive, but I would suggest that you write up the | > > proposal, as a proposed patch to the manual. (Often the documentation | > > is the hardest to write, so perhaps it'll be easier for you if you | > > implement it and then document it. :-) | > | > No problem. I'll mail the documentation patch to the list when I have | > it done. | | While working on this, I noticed that the current autom4te code | reverses the order of the `-I' options before passing them to m4. The | documentation says: | | `--include=DIR' | `-I DIR' | Also look for input files in DIR. Multiple invocations | accumulate. Contrary to M4 but in agreement with common sense, | directories are browsed from last to first. | | From my perspective, this behavior is extremely counter-intuitive. | Every other tool that I know of that accepts a `-I' option (including | gcc, GNU make, GNU m4, and perl) prepends the arguments to the search | path in the order specified. As a result, I was extremely surprised | to discover that autoconf does the reverse.
Because the logic is to respect the last flag occurrence first for all the other flags but this one. Honestly, to me it is a serious bug in all the other implementations. And it *does* matter to autom4te, for instance because you do want sometimes to say ``I want _my_ macros to be used first''. So you `autom4te -l autoconf -I .'. But then, you want `.' to take precedence.
