Re: Handling PACKAGE, PACKAGE_VERSION, etc. with multiple libraries

On Thu, 5 Aug 2004, J.T. Conklin wrote:
> > ... You are polluting the preprocessor symbols' with #defines. This is
> > considered bad design.
>
> I'm not exactly sure what you consider "bad design", but I think I

The existence of autoconf at all is clear evidence of "bad design". 
The fathers of Unix should have thought about portability issues 30 
years ago and included a feature-based configuration mechanism as a 
standard part of Unix.  There was a failure to think adquately far 
ahead.  Even the POSIX guys have not managed to provide a useful 
solution.  Instead they just made things more difficult.

Instead we continue to consume oodles of CPU cycles with huge clunky 
shell scripts.

> Yes, I can emit a config.h with only my ACE_ #defines myself.  I may
> end up having to do that.  I'm not looking forward to it, since auto-
> header almost does it right automagically.  It essentially forces me
> to come up with a similar tool, as it would be foolhardy to even try
> to maintain ~500 feature tests by hand.

It is not really quite as bad as that.  You can clone the 
auto-generated config.h.in to another file name (e.g. 
ace_config.h.in), with the parts you don't need stripped out.  Then 
use AC_CONFIG_HEADERS like

AC_CONFIG_HEADERS([config.h ace_config.h])

This results in a ace_config.h being generated which is similar to 
config.h, but with the nasty parts removed.  In the Makefiles, you 
arrange to install ace_config.h where config.h would normally be 
installed.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen