Re: 03-remove-clean-am-files.patch

[Akim Demaille]

Tom Tromey <address@hidden> writes:

> I don't want to unify the .am readers for 1.5.  My experience is that
> automake users have all kinds of ugly stuff in their Makefile.am.  We
> definitely don't want to support this stuff long-term, but I think
> changing it now would be ill-advised.

I agree.


> Akim> So the plan is that we keep ?FOO? but instead of destroying
> Akim> ?FOO? will evaluate to TRUE/FALSE and then the regular if/fi
> Akim> mechanism will be usable.
> 
> Are you saying you'd change this:
> 
>     if ?FOO?
>     ...
>     endif
> 
> to `if TRUE' or `if FALSE' depending on how `?FOO?' is set by
> &transform?
> 
> That's ok, I guess, though I'd prefer not to take the names `TRUE' and
> `FALSE' away from the user.  It seems a bit baroque for the short
> (1.5) term given that reader unification isn't going to happen.

Yes, that is what I meant.

> Akim> But before handling the conditionals, I still have things to
> Akim> understand about them.  Also, unconditional values should be
> Akim> seen as conditional values, for instance corresponding to TRUE.
> 
> I don't understand this.  Why would you want an unconditional
> conditional?

For the reason above.  First you load the file, second you perform the
%% and ?? substitutions, and then you perform your parsing on it.
And if/fi definitely belongs to the third step, and we want it to be
solved statically.  Hence unconditional conditionals :)