[Ecls-list] Rewriting autoconf -> autoconf/automake

[John Wiegley]

Hello, I was wondering if anyone would be interested in my rewriting the
autoconf system ECL uses?  I've been trying to embed ECL source-wise  
into
another project (so customers wouldn't have to install other  
dependencies),
but I'm finding that ECL's autoconf setup is too dependent on certain
factors.  I ran into these issues:

  1. I cannot build in a different target directory from the source  
directory.
     Autoconf can allow you to build sources from an essentially read- 
only
     location, by collecting all products in a target directory.  I  
use this
     all the time to keep my source tree free of binary products, and  
to build
     multiple targets of the same project.  I could not find a way to  
do this
     with ECL, though I may have missed something.

  2. ECL's top level configure file isn't autoconf generated, which  
makes for
     strange integration issues if you want to include it as a  
subdirectory
     within another autoconf project.  I tried for hours and couldn't  
get this
     to happen as things are now.

ECL's Makefiles aren't all that complicated, so I was thinking that it  
would
take just a couple of days to move to a fully autoconf/automake/ 
libtool setup
that could solve the three issues mentioned above.

Is this of any interest?

John