(consolidating some replies) On Mon, Mar 9, 2026, at 2:18 PM, Nick Bowler wrote: > On Mon, Mar 09, 2026 at 01:14:38PM -0400, Zack Weinberg wrote: >> On Wed, Mar 4, 2026, at 6:51 PM, Nick Bowler wrote: >> > Why implement a new option for this? >> >> Discoverability. If someone's having a problem with autoreconf running >> something it shouldn't, and they look at autoreconf --help, the --exclude >> option will be right there. > > I do think the sentence in the Autoconf manual is better than the > sentence in the autoreconf --help text, because it actually says > what the variables are for: > > The environment variables AUTOM4TE, AUTOCONF, AUTOHEADER, AUTOMAKE, > ACLOCAL, AUTOPOINT, LIBTOOLIZE, INTLTOOLIZE, GTKDOCIZE, M4, and MAKE > may be used to override the invocation of the respective tools. > > Surely it does not need to be explained that the ability to choose > the command which is run also includes the ability to choose a command > which does nothing.
Honestly, I think that *isn’t* clear at all, even with the “may be used to override” wording. It is quite plausible to me that someone would assume this feature is limited to picking *alternative implementations* of the “respective tools,” i.e. that whatever is picked, it has to actually do what the command’s supposed to do. I could address that with another sentence, but, like I said, I think people will not notice that sentence, because they’re too focused on looking for an *option* to make autoreconf do what they want. > Is duplicating a subset of functionality from a longstanding > autoreconf feature really worth this risk? Fair question; just the number of tests I feel I need to write before landing the branch is making me reconsider whether this ought to be put into 2.73. However, against that, the number of complaints we got since 2.70 about autoreconf trying to run tools that it shouldn’t argues that this is a real problem and *not* one that’s adequately addressed by the existing mechanism, albeit perhaps only because people don’t know about it. I didn’t invent the --exclude option; OpenEmbedded has been carrying a patch for it for several years. I’d like to ask the original author of that patch to chime in at this point. Ross, can you remember why you originally wrote this patch? In particular, do you remember if you knew that much the same effect could be had by setting e.g. AUTOPOINT=true in the environment? And, if you did know that, do you remember why that approach didn’t work for OE? zw
