Re: [Nicolas Joly <address@hidden>] Re: CVS automake testsuite failures under Tru64 unix

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Akim Demaille <address@hidden>
> Date: 07 Jun 2002 11:43:41 +0200
> 
> I think it is high time to disable include and sinclude from
> Autoconf.  That's too dangerous.  Paul, do we agree?  m4_include and
> m4_sinclude are available since 2.50, and people are not supposed to
> use include and sinclude.  Do your greps reveal some people still use it?

I checked, and ihe only package I found was Gawk; it still uses sinclude.

Gawk is still using Autoconf 2.13, but I've been after Arnold Robbins
to upgrade.  On May 20 I sent him the minimal patches to upgrade to
2.53, and I think he'll get around to doing it one of these days.
I'll send him a further patch to eliminate sinclude, so that Gawk
would also be safe for a 2.54 without sinclude.  So I think it's OK to
remove include and sinclude.

By the way, the Autoconf manual never mentions m4_include or
m4_sinclude, so it implies that m4_include and m4_sinclude are
equivalent to their m4 equivalents, but that isn't quite right, is it?
m4_include and m4_sinclude warn about multiple inclusions.

> As an aside.  I personnally consider it is a flawn in the specs of M4:
> IMNSHO, something like
> 
>         patsubst([foo], [foo], [dnl])
> 
> should return a *quote* string, i.e., [dnl], not dnl.  That's the
> bottom line of our problem.  I would really love to see a means to
> educate GNU M4 in this regard.  I don't really care how: be it a new
> series of macros, a new option, a new name, whatever.  I just want its
> text processing macros to return a quoted string.

I tend to agree, but wouldn't we have to give M4 a way to quote '['
and ']'?  That would be a nice feature to have, but it's a nontrivial
change....