Re: gnome-core bombs mightily

[Felix Bellaby <felix pooh u-net com>]

Andrew Clausen writes:
 > Would the first copy of an m4 file with the same name suffice?  You could
 > just pre-build a hash table of m4 files to be used (rather than traversing
 > directories), and eliminate duplicate m4 files from the hash.  Deciding
 > which copy to use might be more difficult - perhaps you could rank
 > directories.

This sounds like an attractive approach. Why not try to follow the
the same convention effectively used by compilers:

  When there are two or more m4 files with the same basename in the 
  directories that aclocal searches then it should ignore the duplicates 
  that appear later in its "-I" list or in the $acdir directory and only 
  read the first file with each basename appearing in its "-I" list.

This would enable you to set up your system with each include/
directory matched against an adjacent share/aclocal/ that holds
the m4 macros appropriate for that include/ directory. aclocal
could then be passed an "-I" list that exactly resembles the "-I"
list that you would pass to the compiler (but with share/aclocal
in the place of include/). AFAIK, automake will respond by
constructing makefiles that find the correct #include's and 
libraries under this set up.

Felix