And, again, nothing stops people from writing a pike.m4 (or perhaps pike7519.m4, with a symlink to pike.m4 from the last installed version, in the spirit of previous arguments about not trying to support multiple pikes from the same .m4-file) that is actually intended to be used from automake (that file would probably not be all that similar to the current aclocal.m4, though.)
Doing so would only be good, since it would help people who use automake, and not break things for people who use pike -x module.
/ Per Hedbor ()
Previous text:
2004-01-26 22:50: Subject: Re: Pike @ Debian
Let me remind you that the proposition was to put the pike's aclocal.m4 under a different name in the system-wide .m4 directory. Does that change your assessment?
I'm not sure which system-wide .m4 directory you mean. I didn't get one with the installation of either m4 or autoconf, as far as I'm aware. share/autoconf/*/*.m4 is autoconf internal files. share/aclocal is for files intended to be picked up by aclocal, and you can't even rely on it's existance unless you make pike depend on automake, which I think would be unnecessary and unfortunate.
Neither is the right place for pike's aclocal.m4.
It does *not* mean the external Pike modules written in C _cannot_ use automake, am I right? Or is it forbidden because Pike itself doesn't use it?
You can use automake, but then you will not use pike -x module. And it makes no sense to have aclocal pick up the aclocal.m4 which is intended for use with pike -x. I don't know for sure that it doesn't work to do that (as I haven't tried), no matter if it ever works it's an utterly unsupported way to use that file. It's on par with including files from pike/lib/include/ into C programs.
So the main poitn here is that any debian policy that has to do with automake and the aclocal program is totally irrelevant to pike.
Of course it isn't.
My point is that debian automake policy should be applied only to the installation of files which are intended to be used with automake, or are in some other way closely related to automake. The pike package does not contain a single file that is intended to be used with automake; therefore automake policy is not relevant to the pike interpreter package.
/ Niels Möller (vässar rödpennan)