Malcolm> Consequently, if you have a patch that involves changes Malcolm> to the configuration scripts, feel free to make the Malcolm> change to configure.in. I'll make the corresponding Malcolm> changes to configure.ac until the move is made. Malcolm> Hopefully this situation won't last long. Assuming the University network stays up, there will be a checkpoint beta RSN (already tagged, 9 successful builds on Mac OS X/PPC and Linux 2.4/Athlon, patch to CHANGES-beta will go out as soon as I finish reading the lists) and then I'll do the configure.ac doc work, probably tomorrow. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.

Malcolm> The autoconf patches are now in 21.5. From now on, if Malcolm> you need to modify the configuration scripts please edit Malcolm> configure.ac and use autoconf 2.59 to generate configure. Hurray! Yeah! Yes! Expect a beta release shortly. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.

ms> I find myself confused by the dichotomy between --enable-xxx ms> and --with-xxx (especially as the configure script seems to ms> know it's easy to get confused). Is there any easy way to ms> predict when it's which one? Not as far as I can see. My taste differs from Malcolm's in several cases. AFAICT the implementations of --enable-xxx and --with-xxx are basically identical. The official take is that "enable" means to switch on code inside of the application, while "with" means a specific external program needed to support the feature. So, "--with-xemacs-compiler=g++" makes sense (g++ is an external application), but which is the appropriate migration path for "--ldflags"? How about the widgets, where any of several libraries might be autodetected, but in the case of the Athena 3d lossage you need to specify "--with-athena=FLAVOR"? In a lot of cases which ever you choose sounds awkward. -- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.

Michael Sperber <sperber(a)informatik.uni-tuebingen.de&gt; wrote: Normally, --enable should be used to activate internal features (e.g. debugging), and --with should be used to compile stuff requiring external components (e.g. png support). The frontier between the two is not /that/ clear though. In any case, if we're going to break backward compatibility, it shouldn't be to invent yet another scheme of ours, but to conform more closely to the autotools'tradition/convention. People using different autotools driven packages like them to behave in a similar way (and will for instance issue a quick "configure --help | grep --enable" to figure out what's available). -- Didier Verna, didier(a)lrde.epita.fr, http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier EPITA / LRDE, 14-16 rue Voltaire Tel.+33 (1) 44 08 01 85 94276 Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France Fax.+33 (1) 53 14 59 22 didier(a)xemacs.org

ms> I don't know about the technicalities---but how hard is it to ms> just drop the ---with and --enable prefixes entirely? If not, ms> I believe we should just go with one of the two. Stephen> We can't win this one. It's trivial to drop them, we just lose all of Stephen> the autoconf 2.5x facilities for dealing with app-defined options. Stephen> Having spent a lot of time working on configure recently, IMO this Stephen> improvement in maintainability is worth the user pain. Stephen> If you go with just one of the variants, then you'll be incompatible Stephen> with all other autoconf applications, and users who build XEmacs once Stephen> a year (unlike you, who will get used to this in a couple of weeks) Stephen> will get confused. I don't know what "incompatible" means in this context, given that everybody who understands autoconf 2.5 seems to admit that the dividing line is at least fuzzy. But I'll take your word for it. -- Cheers =8-} Mike Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla