Re: [PATCH] New language support interface

[Albert Chin]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 04:24:37AM +0000, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-03-18 at 03:51, Albert Chin wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 08:20:09PM +0000, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> > > This removes the AC_LIBTOOL_TAGS macro in favour of a set of LT_INIT
> > > options and a new LT_LANG macro to select language support.
> > > 
> > > The three LT_INIT options are:
> > > 
> > >   no-lang         No language support other than C.
> > >   all-lang        All supported languages
> > >   auto-lang       Automatically detect required support
> > 
> > Ick. What developer using libtool does _not_ know what languages they
> > need. Is there every a case where "auto-lang" would not be used?  Why
> > would a C-based project ever want a non-C-based tag?
>
> auto-lang is probably the best default, it hooks whatever language
> support they've already enabled through the Autoconf macros.

Agreed.

> all-lang is needed for Libtool itself, and probably not much else.  We
> want everything on for /usr/bin/libtool after all.

If it's libtool-specific, why expose it? I say we use a private macro
to do the equivalent.

> no-lang is there because once language support is enabled, you can't
> disable it.  There are people out there who are going to scream because
> the C++ parts of their project don't use Libtool, so why is libtool
> enabling C++ support? etc.

Whiners :)

So why not LT_LANG() == LT_LANG(C)? It's already assumed that
LT_LANG(C++) == LT_LANG(C)/LT_LANG(C++)?

> > Have we decided in favor of two macros to initialize libtool,
> > LT_INIT([options]), and LT_LANG([tags]) rather than LT_INIT([options],
> > [tags])?
>
> You can only specify one tag with LT_LANG:
> ...

Ok.

> > > The options cause LT_LANG to be called for each required language.
> > > This can be passed either a tag name ("CXX") or an Autoconf-style
> > > language name ("C++").
> > 
> > Ick. There should be one way to do it, and one way only.
>
> The Autoconf-style names are the ones documented for end-users, however
> internally (for various reasons) Libtool uses the tag names instead, so
> it's worth mentioning here so the other developers don't get surprised
> by things that don't use them in the source :-)

I still dislike it. We're supporting two methods and advocating one.
There is really no reason to use CXX over C++.

-- 
albert chin (address@hidden)