M4 problems

[Ian Lance Taylor]

   Date: Sat, 4 Apr 1998 20:12:36 +0200 (MET DST)
   From: Krister Walfridsson <cato@df.lth.se>

   Are there any good reason we define M4 in the egcs/Makefile?

The top level egcs Makefile is just a generic Makefile which can be
used to build a number of tools in the same directory.  It's the same
Makefile that is for binutils and gdb releases, for example.

One of the tools that it can build is autoconf.  To do that, you would
put the autoconf and m4 sources as sibling directories to gcc, and run
something like make all-autoconf.  When doing this, M4 is defined to
make the right thing happen.

   The reason I don't like it is that I get errors from autoconf that I 
   need GNU m4, but autoconf is generally smart enough to find my GNU m4
   (which in NetBSD normlly lives in /usr/pkg/bin and is called gm4) unless
   M4 is defined. And we doesn't use M4 anywhere as far I can see.

I think the right fix for the general case is probably to locate m4 in
the top level configure script, along the lines of how DEFAULT_YACC is
handled.

Ian