Re: Flogging a dead horse....

[Roger Leigh <roger@whinlatter.uklinux.net>]

"B. Douglas Hilton" <bdhilton@charter.net> writes:

> Man autoconf is a hassle. I love autotools / hate m4. My brain hurts
> everytime I mess with aclocal.m4.

You should never, ever, touch aclocal.m4.  It's completely generated
by aclocal.  If there's an error, fixing the original m4 macro is the
correct solution.  Nowadays, with new versions of autoconf, you can
actually use m4 tracing to work out what's breaking, which is a big
improvement on earlier versions.

> Millions of undocumented macro variables, you need to understand m4
> in order to understand m4... it is so sweet when it all works but
> setting it up is a nightmare.

I have bitter experience of debugging m4, and it's not quick or easy.
m4 in itself isn't a difficult language, but the quoting gets quite
confusing once they are several deep, and you need to quote quotes
etc..


-- 
Roger Leigh

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