Re: Motivation for renaming configure.in to configure.ac and its effect?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 03/08/2010 12:12 PM, Steffen Dettmer wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to understand the motivation for renaming configure.in
> to configure.ac. If I remember correctly it was related to the
> fact that ./config.status or whoever else processes .in files.

The reason is suffix rules:

*.ac's are processed by "autoconf" (written in the "autoconf-language")

*.in's are arbitrarily formated, arbitrarily formated files.

> Is the renaming configure.in to configure.ac cosmetic only
No (cf. above)

> and
> is it safe to keep configure.in in old projects/branches?
No, you should rename them. Keeping configure.in's doesn't make no sense 
at all.

Ralf