gnome-common - what we should do instead

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

As Christian kindly reminded me today ;-) gnome-common still
exists. gnome-common isn't a great idea on the whole. If it exists it 
should be much smaller.

I don't think removing the module is a great idea either right now,
but I'd like to stop putting things in it. It's pretty much always
wrong to do so if the current macros are any indication.

Link to autoconf macros package:
 http://www.gnu.org/software/ac-archive/

Commentary on macros2/* and what should be done with them:

 AC_CHECK_UTMP - just inline in libzvt configure.in

 GNOME_COMPILE_WARNINGS, 
 GNOME_CXX_WARNINGS - in ac-archive or in autoconf itself (ac-archive
                      already has an equivalent macro). Or maybe in
                      GLib since GLib already does
                      compiler-abstraction sort of things.

 AC_CHECK_CURSES, etc. - in ac-archive or inline wherever we actually
                         use it
 
 GNOME_COMMON_INIT - I believe this is totally useless except the line 
                     ACLOCAL="$ACLOCAL $GNOME_ACLOCAL_FLAGS" so it
                     could be inlined. Else put it in libgnome or
                     something.

 GNOME_GTKDOC_CHECK - should come with gtk-doc

 GNOME_DEBUG_CHECK - totally useless
 
 AM_GNOME2_GETTEXT - replaced by GLib thingy

 GNOME_CHECK_PKGCONFIG - obsoleted by PKG_CHECK_MODULES

 GNOME_PLATFORM_GNOME_2 - totally bogus, use a CVS branch
 
 GNOME2_X_CHECKS - should come with libgnomeui if it exists, but it
                   shouldn't exist, because it's broken and useless


The remaining use for gnome-common is the autogen.sh script. I agree
it's nice to have a central spot for this script, but since the only
actual legitimate use for gnome-common is this one script, it seems a
little bit silly.

Havoc