Re: Arguments to configure

[Gavin Smith]

On Wed, Oct 03, 2018 at 12:10:49PM +0200, Sébastien Hinderer wrote:
> Many thanks for your openness. Well beyond the particular semantics we
> are trying to achieve, I think one reason for being more permissive
> about the syntax of arguments would be to help people in situation
> similar to mine maintaining backwards compatibility. Indeed, even in the
> cases where the arguments have been poorly named, I think it would help
> to be able to still use them and then deprecate them slowly, rather than
> being forced to change them brutally.

I don't think there is much to gain by being more permissive. I doubt 
there are many configure scripts like yours that people want to rewrite 
with autoconf. I'd suggest only allowing different kinds of arguments if 
this would actually allow a better interface - otherwise, it's allowing 
worse interfaces, which wouldn't ever be deprecated in practice.