Re: [pcre-dev] PCRE autotools patch drg3

On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Daniel Richard G. wrote:

> Round three of The Patch(tm). This one is uuencoded for your
> whitespace-preserving pleasure.

This looks good to me too. I have only one comment:

In order to understand the new way of doing things, I studied how it all
works carefully, in terms of which command generates which files from
which other files. One thing that bothered me was that the comments in
config.h.in are also repeated in configure.ac. I then discovered that
config.h.in is generated from configure.ac by autoheader... BUT ... in
autogen.sh, the call to autoheader comes after automake.

I looked at a couple of other autogen.sh files that are on my box, and
in both cases their ordering was autoheader, automake, autoconf.

Now, config.h.in is of course in the distribution, so the current
ordering does happen to work, but it doesn't seem right.

I did the experiment of getting rid of config.h.in altogether and then
running autoconf, autoheader, automake followed by ./configure and
build, and it all worked fine.

Therefore, I think that autogen.sh should be changed so that autoheader
is run before automake. I don't think it matters whether autoconf comes
before or after.

PROPOSAL: I am happy to take over this patch at this point, apply it to
my master sources, and proceed to work towards integrating the various
other issues that I have on my list, including documentation. (I can, of
course, trivially make the autogen.sh change noted above.) I would hope
to make a release candidate for 7.1 fairly soon.

But I won't do this until I've received an "OK" from both Bob and
Daniel, to both of whom I owe a big debt of thanks for taking on this
extensive restructuring work.

Philip

--
Philip Hazel, University of Cambridge Computing Service.