RE: Writing New Macros

[Eric Lemings]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Blake [mailto:address@hidden 
> Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 6:26 PM
> Cc: Eric Lemings; address@hidden
> Subject: Re: Writing New Macros
> 
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> 
...
> If you follow the philosophy of sticking with the
> well-documented and well-tested interfaces, then you have shifted the
> burden away from yourself and on to the autoconf maintainers, 
> making your
> job easier, and even making the maintainer's job easier.

I just wanted to point out that the reason why people use internal
interfaces/implementation at all is also to make their job easier
up front.  It's just that they do so at the risk of making their
job harder on down the road if the internals change, as you point
out.  If using internal interfaces/implementations saves you enough
work, it may be a risk worth taking.

...
> undocumented _AC_COMPUTE_INT, particularly when the newly documented
> AC_COMPUTE_INT uses different parameters, whereas if users had left
> _AC_COMPUTE_INT alone or begged much earlier to make it a public
> interface, this could have been a non-issue.

Too bad I'm stuck with Autoconf 2.59.  It only has the internal
_AC_COMPUTE_INT macro.  Otherwise, I would be using the public
AC_COMPUTE_INT version!

Eric.