Re: [Autoconf] Re: HTML format documentation

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Friday, September 15, 2000 at 16:29:04 (-0600), Richard Stallman wrote: ]
> Subject: [Autoconf] Re: HTML format documentation
>
> The GNU coding standards explicitly specifies the possible configure
> options.  Whatever names we choose for new options, they will have to
> be given in the coding standards.  They will not be exceptions, they
> will be defined options.

This is probably nit picking but in some sense the existing coding
standards already allow entire classes of exceptions by definiton.
There are exceptions defined explicitly already, such as the entire
class of `--enable-FEATURE[=PARAMETER]' and `--with-PACKAGE[=ARG]'
options where the best you can do to specify their form is use a glob or
regex pattern.

Furthermore the standard GNU Autoconf generated scripts already use many
configure options which are not mentioned in the coding standards so far
as I can see....

>     But in the case of CC, CFLAGS etc. these guys are traditional envvars,
>     they have deeply a nature of variables.

Actually they're traditionally Make variables and unfortunately they are
sometimes taken from the environment too.  Using environment variables
in build systems should be avoided unless they are explicitly overridden
by the build system from some more predictable source (eg. a Make
variable).

> Sorry, I don't see this "nature" at all.  I only see that you're
> proposing two different ways of specify data for configure,
> and I don't know how I would figure out which of the two ways
> is used for any given datum.

I'm not sure I know what was being meant here for sure either but my
interpretation is that configuration items such as the CC and CFLAGS
Make variables (which are as I say unfortunately sometimes taken from
the environment) have the nature of being variables in the sense that
they may contain many command-line settings and they're usually used in
command invocations via variable expansion features (be they of the
shell, or Make, or whatever).

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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