[Plplot-devel] Autoheadaches [was: Re: Make of plplot-5.2.0 fails ...]

[Rafael L. <lab...@ps...>]

I have plunged more deeply into the header configuration problem.  I seems
that that are several small independent problems and the conjunction of some
of them may have been triggering the bug observed by Joao.  Let us see which
are those problems:

1) AC_CONFIG_HEADERS should be used in place of AM_CONFIG_HEADER in
   configure.ac.  I guess that the use of the deprecated AM_CONFIG_HEADER is
   harmful with the present version of autoconf/automake, but who nows.

2) The file include/plDevs.h is totally useless since all of its definitions
   are already duplicated in include/plConfig.h.  I would recommend to
   delete taht file from the repository (or actually include/plDevs.h.in)
   and replace all inclusions of plDevs.h by plConfig.h.  The files
   concerned by this change are drivers/*.c,
   bindings/tk/{plserver.h,tcpip.c}, include/plcore.h, and src/plfreetype.c.
   Also, remove include/plDevs.h from the call to AC_CONFIG_HEADERS in
   configure.ac and from the list pkginclude_HEADERS in include/Makefile.am.

3) Autoheader is being called in bootstrap.sh unnecessarily. Autoheader is
   only needed when there is no config.h.in source file (in our case
   include/plConfig.h.in), since it is created automatically from the
   AC_DEFINE macros seen in configure.ac.

4) There is a deprecated file acconfig.h from the top-level directory.  We
   can happily remove it from the CVS repository.

I have no time to do extensive tests, but implementing the suggestions above
should fix the problem, or at least make a step forward in having a more
sane headers configuration.

Another unrelated bizarre thing is the command "touch include/plConfig.h.in"
in bootstrap.sh.  From the CVS log, this was introduced in the AM-LT branch,
as a workround for problems that I found with autoheader (see
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/plplot/plplot/bootstrap.sh?rev=1.1.2.4&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup)
If autoheader is not called any more in bootstrap.sh, I think that that
touch command should be also removed.

-- 
Rafael