On 03/08/2010 01:52 PM, Steffen Dettmer wrote:
On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 12:29 PM, Ralf Corsepius<rc040203@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
* On 03/08/2010 12:12 PM, Steffen Dettmer wrote:
I'm trying to understand the motivation for renaming configure.in
to configure.ac. If I remember correctly it was related to the
fact that ./config.status or whoever else processes .in files.
The reason is suffix rules:
*.ac's are processed by "autoconf" (written in the "autoconf-language")
ok, let me rephrase my question:
What was the motivation to change the name of the main file to be
processfrom by autoconf to .ac?
There are many other files processed by autoconf, such as macro
include files. I looked to a few examples in
http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf-archive but all I picked
were called file.m4 not file.ac (which is fine of course!).
Do we have to expect in future to see a renaming here too?
*.in's are arbitrarily formated, arbitrarily formated files.
This should have been ".. arbitrary, arbitarily formated files"
Is the renaming configure.in to configure.ac cosmetic only
No (cf. above)
Sorry, I didn't get it. Above I understood that it is cosmetic
only (by some convention because configure.in isn't arbitrarily
formated but written in the "autoconf-language", it should be
called configure.ac), so the answer here should be `yes',
shouldn't it?
Well, if you consider naming C-sources *.c being cosmetics, or if you
prefer to call you C-sources *.jpg, then it's cosmetics.
The tools you are going to use (One of these is autoconf, another one is
make). It's all suffix rules, mime-types etc.
The fact autoconf-source files used to be called "configure.in" was a
(minor) bug in older versions of autoconf! The fact autoconf still
accepts it is legacy to outdated conventions ("bugward compatibility" in
autoconf slang).
Ralf
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