RE: Change request: file names

[Tim Van Holder]

> Not only gross, it wouldn't work on DOS anyway.  DOS has a 8.3 filename
> limit.  I think these kind of limitations will have to resort to cross
> building to the non-compliant systems.  Leave it alone.
Actually, on DJGPP (and I think this is currently the only DOS environment
that is unixy enough to run autoconf in the first place), this works just
fine. In a LFN environment, you use the long name, in a SFN one (i.e. pure
DOS with the 8+3 restriction), you get ACVERSION.M4I, which the C library
will find if asked for 'acversion.m4in'.

The only things you need to look out for on DOS/DJGPP is:
 - no multiple dots
 - first 8 chars of name + first 3 chars of extension need to be unique
   one package that is seriously broken in this respect is binutils
   (cpu-ia64-foo.h and cpu-ia64-bar.h all resolve to the same name on DOS,
    and there are several such file groups in binutils).
There's even a package (doschk) that checks for such problems (it's in the
non-gnu directory on GNU FTP mirrors).

In any case, many packages already support DOS by providing an alternate
template name (the most common being using config.hin for config.h). I'm
not asking for a change in autoconf's behaviour regarding template names;
just that those files in the distribution that violate DOS naming
conventions be adjusted. With config.guess.[1x], for example, this is
impossible without breaking support for the majority of platforms (where
typing 'man config_guess' would not be the natural way to get the manual
for config.guess), but for acversion.m4.in it is certainly possible with
causing such troubles.