Re: 13-m4-undivert-culprit.patch

[Gary V. Vaughan]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 05:43:00PM +0200, Akim Demaille wrote:
> I was wondering why the Autoconf test suite started failing with
> Libtool (thanks God for foreign.at...  BTW, Gary, I'd be happy if you
> could peek at this Autoconf test file, and strengthen it if needed).

I will try to find time... I'm utterly swamped (again) at the moment
though.  Prod in a week or two if I forget.

> undivert was complaining in an obscure way.  With this patch, I now
> prefer working with CVS M4 over 1.4 with Autoconf :)

Cool!

> testsuite.log:
> @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
> +/usr/local/bin/m4: configure.in: 3401: Non-numeric argument to `divert': 
> NOTICE
> +/usr/local/bin/m4: configure.in: 3401: Non-numeric argument to `divert': 
> NOTICE
> +/usr/local/bin/m4: configure.in: 3401: Non-numeric argument to `divert': 
> NOTICE
> 
> Aaaarg :(  Yet it starts again: people use internals without asking.
> 
> I understand there can be needs we don't fulfilf, but you have to tell
> us.  I would have provided Libtool with a _macro_, definitely not a
> diversion name.

Mae Culpa.  I seem to remember this was based on some stuff I had been
carrying around for a couple of years that I pasted into libtool.m4 a
while back without thinking carefully enough.  Sorry about that.

> Anyway, now that I see what it is used for, it is clear to me that
> pseudo `echo' is something that M4sh must provide (and as a matter of
> fact I had removed NOTICE precisely to introduce M4SH-INIT, a very
> early diversion used by M4sh to output its initialization stuff before
> Autoconf's).  So that diversion name will no longer be needed.  And I
> guess there are many other sh idioms to move from Libtool to M4sh.

Okay.  I think that libtool's requirement for a non-backslash
intepreting echo is quite unusual -- are you planning to migrate that
functionality from libtool.m4 into m4sh.m4?

Cheers,
        Gary.
-- 
  ())_. Gary V. Vaughan     gary@(oranda.demon.co.uk|gnu.org)
  ( '/  Research Scientist  http://www.oranda.demon.co.uk       ,_())____
  / )=  GNU Hacker          http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool  \'      `&
`(_~)_  Tech' Author        http://sources.redhat.com/autobook   =`---d__/