Hello, sorry that I post a followup to my previous mail. I proposed that automake would generate file amvars.in, which would then config.status transform to amvars.
Actually, there is no need for this. We shuld have a specialized code to generate file amvars. This specialized code could also handle subsitutions which end with backslash and multiline substitutions. This would mean that there would be no longer any need for the hack I proposed in http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake-patches/2005-10/msg00018.html The code could look like this: rm -rf amvars for ac_var in $ac_subst_vars; do eval ac_val=\$$ac_var sed '$!s/$/\\/;$s/\\$/& /;$s/^$/ /' >>amvars <<EOF $ac_var = $ac_val EOF done (... and, of course, we have to handle AM_SUBST_NOMAKE somehow.) Yes, calling sed once for each AC_SUBSTed variable looks slow, but it is _linear_, Ralf. ;-) Anyway, I think we can start with this implementation. Later on, we can try whether something like for ac_var in $ac_subst_vars; do echo $ac_var = @$ac_var@@\n@ | ./config.status --file=amvars:- would speed things up. Stepan
