Hi Ralf,
I must admit that I have not RTFM on this ;)
After reading the section you mentioned, there is already quite some
information on the topic.
Currently the part that may be misleading is the part where it says
that one is encouraged to avoid using 'AC_CONFIG_FOOS([$my_foos])'.
This phrasing of the sentence suggests that it may still be valid to
do so.
In fact, it is not. Running configure works. But, just as my example,
a config.status on either fooo or foooo does not. Even adding an
initialisation of my_foos to init-cmds wont help. I would have guessed
that maybe running "config.status 'fooo foooo'" would then still have
worked, but even that doesn't seem to (config.status apparently splits
up all command line arguments, even if they were quoted, so it gives
an 'error: invalid argument: fooo'.).
I would rephrase the section to explicitly forbid users to use the
my_foos construct as is currently mentioned and generally advise users
not to use variables in the tag section. It would be good to mention
what users can expect if they would still try to do it (i.e. configure
works, but config.status wont).
In addition Section 4.6 could describe the workaround example for
using variables as you provided. A suggestion for rephrasing the
example would be:
FOO_VERSION=1.0
AC_CONFIG_FOOS([foo-$FOO_VERSION], [], [FOO_VERSION='$FOO_VERSION'])
The case in my project where I was using variables also doesn't use
PACKAGE_VERSION (I just used that variable to make my example to you
as short as possible).
Anyway. Thanks for the response. I can now at least get my
config.status to work again.
Best regards,
Sander
On 22 aug 2008, at 09:16, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
Hi Sander,
thanks for the report. Your reports always make for some good
thinking.
* Sander Niemeijer wrote on Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 05:24:08PM CEST:
AC_INIT(foo, 1.0)
AC_CONFIG_FILES([foo-$PACKAGE_VERSION:foo.in])
AC_OUTPUT
When running configure it correctly creates the file 'foo-1.0'.
However when I then try to run config.status for the file I get:
----
$ config.status foo-1.0
config.status: error: invalid argument: foo-1.0
Yes, in this case you have to pass the variable to config.status,
as hinted in the manual, but probably not clear enough:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/html_node/Configuration-Actions.html
>
So this should work:
AC_CONFIG_FILES([foo-$PACKAGE_VERSION:foo.in], [],
[PACKAGE_VERSION='$PACKAGE_VERSION'])
Note that the weird quoting works because the third argument is
expanded
inside a here document. FWIW, I'd recommend using a different
variable
than PACKAGE_VERSION to avoid potential clashes.
I don't think we will fix this (because I think fixing it /right/ is
probably hard), but if you have suggestions (or a patch) on how to
improve the manual here so that it is clearer, that would be nice.
Cheers,
Ralf
