If you want to contribute ...
then please don't hesitate a second! Just send the m4 source to
ac-archive-maintainers@gnu.org
mailinglist which is used now by all ac-archive parts. You can still
send it to me directly, Guido Draheim
<guidod@gmx.de> which is good if
you want to have your macros on a personal subdirectory on the
sfnet branch that is free even for experimental stuff. Note however
the section about the contribution format
below.
Contribution Format
For one thing - I would appreciate if you could split your macros into
one-per-mail, rather than sending me your whole aclocal.m4 file, because
this makes the inclusion of the submission into the archive much easier
for me. It also allows me to review your macro and send you some hints
(if you do not want that, please notify me, I just want to be helpful).
Also, I'd like to ask you to adhere to a few formatting rules in
your submissions: Every macro should start with a few comment lines,
describing what exactly it tests, what results it does produce and how
it may be called by potential users. After the comments, the actual m4
code follows.
In the comments, you should use a few directives to mark special
contents, that is interpreted by the perl scripts which convert the m4
input to the HTML page the users will see:
- @synopsis
- This keyword should be followed by a one-line example, showing
how to use the autoconf macro, similar to the synopsis line in
the usual Unix man files.
- @version
- This keyword usually contains the string "$Id$" to have the version automatically maintained by
CVS here on the server. You may set it manually, though, if you
want to.
- @author
- You have written the macro, so please say so and state your
name and e-mail address after this keyword, so that users may
express their gratitude, report problems or suggest
enhancements.
Here is an example, how your submission should look like:
dnl @synopsis The syntax how to use the macro.
dnl
dnl A description of what the macro does and what results
dnl it produces.
dnl
dnl This description may extend over multiple paragraphs,
dnl if you like.
dnl
dnl Every line that is indented by more than one
dnl blank will be formatted verbatim, so that you
dnl can include examples in the description.
dnl
dnl @version $Id$
dnl @author Your Name <your@email.address>
dnl
AC_DEFUN([MACRO_NAME],
[...]
])dnl
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Macro names should always be quoted in brackets, otherwise Autoconf
will break in case a macro definition is (accidently) included
multiple times in a configure.in file, as the macro name would be
expanded the second time the definition is parsed. Note that autoconf
can warn about symbols starting with
AC_ or
AM_ when it does
exist but has not been found. That is a nice trick, however one should
rarely start naming macros with the AC_/AM_ prefix since they might
coincide with names of macros from future versions from autoconf/automake
and which would shadow your own macro then. The AX_ prefix is reserved
for the usage in the ac-archive and it will be ensured that only one macro of
the different name exists here (and the `acinclude` tool does already
recognize this prefix and warns about missing ones). The AX prefix
is therefore recommended now.
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