an update to automake-1.11?

[Sam Varshavchik]

Richard W.M. Jones writes:

> On Sun, Jul 05, 2009 at 10:45:46AM -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
>> What line number changes? You cut a patch against configure, and you're  
>> done. That's it.
> 
> And you get a big patch containing line numbers.  Here's a single line
> change to configure.ac, and the corresponding patch that generates:
  ======================

Who said anything about patching configure.ac? The cited link is not a patch 
to the configure script, it's a result of a patch to configure.ac.

I'll repeat again: patch configure, not configure.ac.

I said "patch configure", and you reply, "well, it won't work because if you 
patch configure.ac, run autoconf, then generate the patch between the 
original configure, and the new configure, I get a big hairball". Duh.

I've been reading configure scripts long enough to know that your 
pseudo-patch is the result of adding AC_PATH_PROG(PERL, perl) to 
configure.ac.

Now, why don't you explain why, and we'll go from there. Presuming that this 
is needed because some script in $srcdir uses the PERL environment variable, 
or a later part of the configure script itself (it assumes that PERL is set 
in the environment) then I would just patch in:

PERL=/usr/bin/perl
export PERL

instead, to configure. Or, have the spec file set PERL itself, before 
running configure. If the reason for the patch is that there's some *.in in 
src with a @PERL@ placeholder, I'd just patch that *.in file directly, 
instead.

No need to uselessly screw around with configure, when I don't even need to 
do it.

Like I said earlier, there seems to be a meme going around that making a 
minor fix to configure is an impossible task. It can't be done, the only 
option is to fix configure.ac, and rerun autoconf. configure itself is 
untouchable. You can't patch it, you have to patch configure.ac, and then 
regenerate it.

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