[PPL-devel] Generating Autotools files without autoreconf

[Roberto Bagnara]

Hi there,

GCC developers that also track the Parma Polyhedra Library (PPL, http://www.cs.unipr.it/ppl/)
are in a situation whereby, while the GCC compiler is requiring Autoconf version 2.59 (precisely
that one), the PPL requires a version >= 2.61.  This is annoying, because they are forced to
use at least two different versions of Autoconf.

Basile Starynkevitch (in CC) suggested we put a generated configure script on the CVS
repository.  Thus we now have configure.repo in the repository, the idea being that
a simple

     mv configure.repo configure

could be used as an alternative to autoconf.  However, the problem remains how
to perform the update of all the other generated configuration files.
In other words, we would need something that acts like autoreconf except
for the fact that it would not attempt to build configure from configure.ac.
Probably a small shell script invoking libtool, aclocal, automake
in the right order and recursing to subdirectories is what is needed, but
we are not sure.   What is the right solution?
All the best,

    Roberto

-- 
Prof. Roberto Bagnara
Computer Science Group
Department of Mathematics, University of Parma, Italy
http://www.cs.unipr.it/~bagnara/
mailto:bagnara at cs.unipr.it