thi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> i don't believe installation of tools using different prefixes is really
> considered a misinstallation.
Agreed. "misinstallation" was probably the wrong word. In any case
and my view, the problem lies entirely with automake and libtool and
not with how Guile uses them. When you install automake and libtool
with different prefixes, they just don't work together without the
user being aware of the differing prefixes and fighting them.
This can be seen as either a bug with automake, libtool, both, or the
way they have been installed. I don't see it as a bug in Guile.
Which does not mean that we can't install your workaround. But I
think we should be reluctant to do so. Too many workarounds do not
make for good maintainability, because their `reasons-of-existence'
are usually ill-defined and dependent on random external curiosities,
which might turn into completely different curiosities without notice.
I don't think people will be happy to maintain bug-compatability
because of the many workarounds that have been installed elsewhere.
Anyway, back to this specific workaround, I think it has a special
audience that might make me reconsider my position. they way I
understand the situation, it should help people most who want to
compile Guile from CVS, but are not really doing development on Guile.
I think we want to encourage people to compile from CVS because we
then don't have to release a tarball so often. [Do the nightly
snapshots still exists?]
In that light, we should make it easy to compile from CVS. The next
question then is: how common is this automake/libtool problem? I
think it's quite common, it has happened to me on all platforms and
all projects. How hard is it to fix this problem without hacking
automake, libtool, or Guile? Not too hard, I'd say. You just need to
install automake and libtool with a common prefix and use them instead
of the old ones. I found that I had to do that in the end anyway,
because I don't want to depend on the versions installed by vendors.
Installation from source is very easy for both automake and libtool.
But I agree that it would be much more convenient when it would just
work. Therefore, your patch is probably the right thing, anyway. But
we should make sure that it is consistent. One thing I'm aware of is
that the "-I" options are only passed to aclocal when it is invoked
from autogen.sh, but not when invoked from make. We should probably
also set ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS in the relevant Makefile.am files. Could you
update your patch to do that?
In addition to this workaround, we shuld also be approaching the
autoconf/automake/libtool guys with this problem and ask for their
opinion. Maybe they have a superior solution that would help all
packages that use automake/libtool and not just Guile. Or maybe we
can help them develop one.
- Marius
