Re: [RFC] Short- and medium-term proposal for AC_CHECK_* overhauling

[Paul Eggert]

Thanks for thinking about this problem and proposing a concrete solution.

"Bonzini" <address@hidden> writes:

>     _ac_check_func 'strerror'
>     if test $ac_cv_func_strerror = yes; then

Nice.  How about this instead? it's even clearer:

      if ac_check_func strerror; then

> I know that shell function adoption was said to be scheduled for
> Autotest at start, but so far I see nothing, not even in CVS, even a
> few months after Autoconf 2.57 has been released.

Would it be possible to conditionalize this feature at first?   That is, we 
could
have shell functions be controlled by a macro

AC_USE_SHELL_FUNCTIONS(arg)

If the argument is 1, use shell functions; if 0, don't use them.  The
default is 0 at first, but we'll change the default to 1 eventually.

> If parenthesized lists were ever to be made the only possibility,

My own feeling is that it's too soon to require parenthesized lists.
Users already have too many compatibility issues already.

> NI am also going to prototype part 1 with some tests on GNU
> Smalltalk, which has over a megabyte of configury distributed among
> four scripts, in a short time (I hope to provide results in a
> month), and put effort this summer in part 2 and possibly 3.

Thanks very much!