confusing option name for wxWidgets configuration

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

Hello,

Background: I've been working on a side-by-side installation of
wxWidgets 2.8 and 2.9. The main problem on Mac is that wxWidgets 2.8
cannot be compiled on operating systems newer than 10.6 (released 4
years ago) and a lot of programs still don't support version 2.9. In
such a scenario wx-config cannot be in path for both 2.8 and 2.9, so
we need a way to specify which one to use.

When playing with configuration, the first thing I tried to do was
    ./configure --with-wx-config=/opt/local/lib/wx/config/osx_cocoa-unicode-2.9
until I realized that gnuplot ignored this completely. Later I
realized that --with-wx-config expects a *PATH* where an exacutable
wx-config needs to be (no other name allowed), not the link to
wx-config file itself. So I created
/opt/local/libexec/wxwidgets/2.9/wx-config with a symlink to the file
mentioned above and now
    ./configure --with-wx-config=/opt/local/libexec/wxwidgets/2.9
works fine.

While the implementation in gnuplot is already a lot better than what
the majority of software does, it's a minor inconvenience that the
option name/meaning is different from the one officially provided by
wxWidgets in the file aclocal/wxwin.m4 (see
https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/blob/master/wxwin.m4) and that
one cannot use an executable with a different name. The "official"
options are:

AC_DEFUN([WX_CONFIG_OPTIONS],
[
    AC_ARG_WITH(wxdir,
                [  --with-wxdir=PATH       Use uninstalled version of
wxWidgets in PATH],
                [ wx_config_name="$withval/wx-config"
                  wx_config_args="--inplace"])
    AC_ARG_WITH(wx-config,
                [  --with-wx-config=CONFIG wx-config script to use (optional)],
                wx_config_name="$withval" )
    AC_ARG_WITH(wx-prefix,
                [  --with-wx-prefix=PREFIX Prefix where wxWidgets is
installed (optional)],
                wx_config_prefix="$withval", wx_config_prefix="")
    AC_ARG_WITH(wx-exec-prefix,
                [  --with-wx-exec-prefix=PREFIX
                          Exec prefix where wxWidgets is installed (optional)],
                wx_config_exec_prefix="$withval", wx_config_exec_prefix="")
])

So instead of
    ./configure --with-wx-config=/opt/local/libexec/wxwidgets/2.9
I would expect either of the following options to work:
    ./configure --with-wx-config=/opt/local/libexec/wxwidgets/2.9/wx-config
    ./configure --with-wx-config=/opt/local/lib/wx/config/osx_cocoa-unicode-2.9
    ./configure --with-wxdir=/opt/local/libexec/wxwidgets/2.9

I didn't try to research the history of this option in gnuplot. I only
know that MacPorts tried to use
--with-wx-config=/opt/local/bin/wx-config until now, but nobody
realized that it didn't work. (It picked the right wx-config, but only
because it was the first one in PATH, not because --with-wx-config
would work the way the package maintainer imagined/expected it to
work.)

My question is the following: would it be acceptable for gnuplot to either:
a) [probably best option] include the official wxwin.m4 from upstream
in its sources and call the few macros as documented in the link above
(I can help with implementation and testing)
b) change the option name and make sure that
--with-wx-config/--with-wxdir would behave approximately the same as
in upstream (as opposed to --with-wx-config behaving as upstream's
--with-wxdir)

Thank you,
    Mojca

PS: I'm not requesting this for the 4.6 branch, but the trunk already
changed the option name(s) for Qt, so I don't find it so problematic
to also change the option name(s) for wxWidgets for the naxt major
release.