To autoconf or not to autoconf (Was Re: Please unbundle the custom and widget libraries from qgnus.)

[wmperry@aventail.com (William M. Perry)]

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Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@charly.cs.uni-dortmund.de> writes:

> >>>>> On 21 Oct 1997, François Pinard said:
> 
>   François> One thing that we also needed, and for a long while, is
>   François> using makeinfo whenever possible to generate the manuals.
>   François> Emacs is just too slow at it, and makeinfo is not so bad
>   François> anyway :-).  Whatever the trick is, makeinfo should be
>   François> used if available on the installing system.
> 
> I've been typing "make makeinfo" for a LONG time now and haven't had
> any problems with it.

  Yes, but you have to go read the makefile to figure that out.  Its not in 
the manual, the .el files, the texi files, nothing. :)

[gnus]find . -type f -print | xargs fgrep -i makeinfo
./texi/Makefile:MAKEINFO=$(EMACS) -batch -q -no-site-file
./texi/Makefile:        $(MAKEINFO) -eval '(find-file "gnus.texi")' $(XINFOSWI)
./texi/Makefile:        $(MAKEINFO) -eval '(find-file "message.texi")' $(XINFOSWI)
./texi/Makefile:makeinfo: 
./texi/Makefile:        makeinfo -o gnus gnus.texi
./texi/Makefile:        makeinfo -o message message.texi

  If you are using autoconf, you can make it automatically choose one or
the other, automatically.  The Emacs/W3 aclocal.m4 has grown quite a bit
over the last few months, and has macros to run arbitrary lisp in the emacs 
you have chosen, and get the return values.  This is how I check for the
existence of widget, custom, package support in XEmacs, etc.

-Bill P.