Re: [RFC] Simplify MinGW canadian crosses

On Sun, Sep 03, 2006 at 11:07:27AM +0100, Keith Marshall wrote:
>Just for the record, I personally prefer to maintain aclocal.m4 by
>hand, rather than generate it using the aclocal tool--which is not an
>autoconf tool, BTW; it is provided by automake, which I utterly loathe
>and detest.  Whle aclocal may be convenient, it is also an excellent
>way to carelessly drag in needless dependencies--as an example,
>consider the GNU libiconv autoconfigury, which forces you to distribute
>config.guess, config.sub and config.rpath, together with about half a
>dozen unnecessary m4 files, along with your project, but none of these
>are essential for a basic libiconv client, and by handcrafting
>aclocal.m4, I can easily eliminate the unnecessary dependencies.  (Of
>course, it isn't the aclocal tool that is particularly at fault
>here--it is a consequence of carelessly written m4 sources in the first
>instance--but using aclocal is lazy, and tends to conceal this initial
>carelessness).

While I agree 100% about automake (I'm not a big fan of autoconf
either), I don't think that it makes sense to hand-craft aclocal.m4.
IMO, if you have a bunch of people updating aclocal.m4 in their own
idiosyncratic way, you are just asking for trouble.  If acinclude.m4
is kept relatively simple, I don't see the harm in using aclocal to
generate all of the aclocal.m4's in the winsup tree.

cgf

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