Subject: devel tool wrappers and --version, --help
From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 12:38:27 -0700

With the automake, autoconf, and libtool wrapper scripts presently in
cygwin, the scripts do not gracefully handle --version and --help from
an empty directory (that is, a directory with no configure.in):

$ cd /tmp
$ autoconf --version
autoconf: no input file
$ automake --version
automake: Couldn't find configure.ac nor configure.in file
$ libtool --version
libtool: Couldn't find configure.ac nor configure.in file

However, the *-devel versions work just fine in the same situation:
$ /usr/autotool/devel/bin/autoconf --version
autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.52
...

I would like to see this patched so that if any of these tools are
executed but no configure.in is found, the wrapper scripts defer to the
*-devel version, so that the --version and --help output is still useful
instead of an error.  Unfortunately, I am not a shell script programmer,
so I can't offer much assistance in this matter.

Also, I think it might be a good idea when --version is passed to the
wrapper scripts to append a line to the output of the *-stable or
*-devel to further indicate the version of the wrapper script.  That
way, I can recognize that the wrapper is automake 2.52 compliant even if
it invoked in a directory which falls back on the automake-stable 2.13
for execution.

-- 
This signature intentionally left boring.

Eric Blake             [email-masked]
  BYU student, free software programmer

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