Re: configuring guile packages [was: GNU Guile 2.9.8 Released [beta]]

[Jason Earl <jearl@notengoamigos.org>]

On Wed, Jan 08 2020, Nala Ginrut wrote:

> Finally I found the problem is that I left a m4/guile.m4 in Artanis for
> some reasons. It's solved by remove it.
>
> Thanks for all the helps!
>
> Best regards
>
> On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 2:56 PM Nala Ginrut <nalaginrut@gmail.com> wrote:

I am far from an expert at Autoconf, and it is entirely possible that I
am leading you astray by mentioning this, but the Autoconf manual
actually covers why you might want to include an updated copy of
guile.m4 in your package instead of removing it entirely.

It even uses guile as an example.

https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Local-Macros.html

Long story short, if you would like Artanis to be usable on older
versions of guile that might include the older version of the guile.m4
file that doesn't work then including the fancier new guile.m4 file in
your package will make Artanis potentially work without a guile upgrade.
That's almost certainly how the guile.m4 file got in your tree in the
first place.  aclocal --install probably got ran at some point and it
included it.

In this particular case, it might not be worth it to ship a local
version of a file that will also be included with guile.  As you have
already seen local m4 files is a bit of foot gun.  They are easy to
forget, and although there are tools that will update your development
files automagically, you have to remember to use the tools.

Plus, that way you don't have to worry about testing to see if Artanis
actually works with old versions of guile :).

Thanks for your work.

Jason Earl