375813 - normally autogenerated file aclocal.m4 contains handwritten stuff

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Enrico Weigelt]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.9) Gecko/20070107 SeaMonkey/1.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.9) Gecko/20070107 SeaMonkey/1.0.7

normally autogenerated file aclocal.m4 contains handwritten stuff.

I'm supplying a patch for fixing that.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Enrico Weigelt]

Attachment: moves the stuff from aclocal.m4 to configure.in

Comment 2

[cls]

Comment on attachment 259997 [details] [diff] [review]
moves the stuff from aclocal.m4 to configure.in


aclocal.m4 is only "autogenerated" if you're using automake, which mozilla currently does not.  And it looks like automake's aclocal tool only checks configure.ac, not configure.in, based upon the documentation with automake 1.9.6.  

You need to explain the benefit of moving those includes to the configure.in.  Are you planning on making mozilla use automake?  If not, then why do we care what aclocal does when it's never run as part of the mozilla development process?

FYI, from autoconf-2.13's info pages:
   To create a `configure' script with Autoconf, you need to write an
Autoconf input file `configure.in' and run `autoconf' on it.  If you
write your own feature tests to supplement those that come with
Autoconf, you might also write files called `aclocal.m4' and
`acsite.m4'.  If you use a C header file to contain `#define'
directives, you might also write `acconfig.h', and you will distribute
the Autoconf-generated file `config.h.in' with the package.

Comment 3

[Enrico Weigelt]

Newer autoconf versions tend to destroy the hand-written aclocal.m4,
so I was forced to move it out to some other file(s) and include it
via m4_include().

BTW: the point that this patch obviously isn't honored for now more
than a year, increases preasure for an fork.

Comment 4

[Chris Cooper [:coop] (he/him)]

Mass bug cleanup for Core:Build Config.

If you feel this bug has been closed in error, please re-open with new details.