Re: autoconf auxdir

[Akim Demaille]

>>>>> "Alexandre" == Alexandre Oliva <address@hidden> writes:

Alexandre> On Apr 11, 2001, Akim Demaille <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Given that we want to promote config/

Alexandre> Who's we?

Well, I for one, and it was something that arose a certain of times.
I do believe Gary too is one of the promoters, but I can't claim it.

The point of promoting is to have the least surprise, and less to
learn.  We are quite happy people use doc/, and not texinfo/, that
they use src/ and not sources/, lib/ and not support/ or portability/
etc. because it helps understanding quickly what happens.

I remember of a friend of mine, a physicist, now a ``doctor ès
particles''.  His favorite game when he was younger was to use \gamma
for the mass, g for the electrical intensity, r for the gravitational
constant and so on.

In CS, conventions are important too, i remains _the_ loop index, x is
expected to be a float or double, etc.

Respecting conventions, establishing conventions by no means aims at
limiting freedom, people can still do whatever they want to.  But
following conventions makes it easier for everybody.


Alexandre> I certainly don't.  I don't care how people name their
Alexandre> support directories.  I myself work on a number of projects
Alexandre> that use different conventions.  This is not a problem,
Alexandre> since this is always documented in configure.in.

I like your conception of `documented' :)



The point of promoting config/ is also because it is in the spirit of
keeping configure related stuff in the config* name space.  Some
people use etc/, but it's somewhat confusing since some projects use
etc/ to hold precisely what goes into sysconfdir.  aux means nothing
and is not portable.  auxdir is puke puke puke, and its sole name does
not help understanding what it contains, although it does more than
etc/ does.