On January 2, 2007 I had sent a patch to the AC_PYTHON_MODULE M4 macro, used by Autoconf. I had mailed the patch to the author-- Andrew Collier at the email address mentioned on the web-site. I never got a reply.

Yesterday night, I was suprised to see that the upstream code has been patched by the modifications that I had sent. So why did the fellow never reply?

Here is my copy of the same code.

Here is my modified version of the AC_PYTHON_MODULE GNU Autoconf M4 macro published at http://autoconf-archive.cryp.to/ac_python_module.html.

The original version of the macro was unable to take care of multiple versions of Python installed on a system. For example I have Python 2.3.5 and Python 2.4.3 on my system, and if I need to check whether a certain module 'foo' is installed for Python 2.4.3 the macro would not work correctly. This was because of the fact that the macro was ignoring the environment variable PYTHON and directly invoking 'python'. Hence clear demarcation between the two versions was not possible.