improving devel/m4

[Ade Lovett]

On Sep 13, 2005, at 12:08 , Mikhail Teterin wrote:
> My change is not patching any of the gm4 sources -- just makes them
> use our standard -lgnuregex building its own.

Whilst you're not patching the sources, the fact that it's changing  
how things are being built does raise up potential issues for the  
consumers of m4, particularly within the ports tree itself.

> I think, you are being overly cautious.

[ade at foo:~] 6% grep m4-1.4.3 /usr/ports/INDEX.local |wc -l
      726

With 726 direct consumers of m4 within the ports tree, caution is  
always a good thing.

> While we are at it, is there a reason, the changeword is not  
> enabled by
> default?

 From the supplied info document:

An experimental feature, which would improve `m4' usefulness, allows
for changing the syntax for what is a "word" in `m4'.  You should use:
      ./configure --enable-changeword
if you want this feature compiled in.  The current implementation
slows down `m4' considerably and is hardly acceptable.  So, it might go
away, do not count on it yet.

Given that the software authors believe it to be unacceptably  
detrimental to performance, I'll tend to believe them, and leave it  
as-is.  Feel free to OPTIONS-ify it, defaulting to off.

OPTIONS= CHANGEWORD "EXPERIMENTAL: PERFORMANCE-IMPACT: Enable  
changeword" off

or something similar.

-aDe