Re: [PATCH] autoconf: Use autoconf to write installation directories to config.mak

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Jun 29, 2006, 18:23 UTC
Message-ID: <7vr717rfbw.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <E1FvvuX-0002Lr-Nt@moooo.ath.cx>

Matthias Lederhofer <matled@gmx.net> writes:

Show 16 quoted lines

>> This is beginning of patch series introducing installation configuration
>> using autoconf (and no other autotools) to git. The idea is to generate
>> config.mak using ./configure (generated from configure.ac) from
>> config.mak.in, so one can use autoconf as an _alternative_ to ordinary
>> Makefile, and creating one's own config.mak.
>
> Are you sure this should be named config.mak? From INSTALL:
>> You can place local settings in config.mak and the Makefile
>> will include them.  Note that config.mak is not distributed;
>> the name is reserved for local settings.
>
> So with another filename either include it
> - before config.mak: the user may override ./configure options with
>   config.mak
> - after config.mak: ./configure overrides config.mak
> At least do not overwrite config.mak if it exists.

Think of it as an incredibly smart editor that you can use to edit your config.mak. As far as I understand it, this is an "opt-in" way for you to manage config.mak without editing it yourself, so I do not have much objections to the series in principle.

I think it is fair to say that autoconf is not so bad compared to its worse friends, but I am biased -- I used to deal with autoconf quite a lot in old days (before there were automake nor libtool), and my own changes to autoconf might still be surviving in a few .m4 files but I doubt it it was so long ago.

Having said that, I am skeptical how well we can keep this contained only to config.mak and keep it "opt-in", so I am not enthused to have this series at the toplevel of the tree.

It would have been a bit easier to swallow if this whole machinery to build config.mk were somewhere under contrib/ (say in contrib/autoconf), with an instruction to make an "opt-in" symlink "ln -s contrib/autoconf/config.mk config.mk" for people who want to use it in the toplevel INSTALL file, perhaps.

The one that touches the Makefile to propagate some variables down to submakes is probably a desirable change but that is pretty much independent from the series.