Re: m4 and after (was: Yacc Shaving)

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 03/11, Amitai Schleier wrote:
> Two options for fixing this class of errors:
> 
> 1. "Explicit": edit each Makefile, commit en masse. Hope that future
> developers remember to include "gm4" when they're supposed to.
> 
> 2. "Implicit": codify in mk/tools/autoconf.mk that anything using
> autoconfery also effectively TOOL_DEPENDS on devel/m4. Hope that this magic
> action at a distance saves more trouble/confusion than it causes.
> 
> I'm leaning toward (2), but that might be because I've not tried
> implementing it yet.

GNU M4 is required by Autoconf according to

  https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/

which says:

  Producing configuration scripts using Autoconf requires GNU M4.  You
  should install GNU M4 (at least version 1.4.6, although 1.4.13 or
  later is recommended) before configuring Autoconf, so that Autoconf's
  configure script can find it.  The configuration scripts produced
  by Autoconf are self-contained, so their users do not need to have
  Autoconf (or GNU M4).

It seems strange to me to have to list the dependencies of a tool in
USE_TOOLS.  For example, if I were to list ant (a build tool written in
Java) as a tool in USE_TOOLS (just an example; I have no idea whether
ant is currently available as a pkgsrc tool), would I need to list java
as a tool as well?  (The ant executable would probably be implemented as
a shell script that finds a java executable to run and then execs into
it.)

Lewis