Re: aux directory name

[Bruno Haible]

Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Has such a report ever been sent against the Autoconf package?
> I mean, before yours now?

Alexandre says that "this very same topic was debated, inconclusively, on
address@hidden, a few years ago".

The arguments against "config" in the discussion on bug-gnulib in March 2005
were (in http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2005-03/msg00119.html):

! I've disliked this name since the day I saw someone do 
!    cd config
!    ls
! looking for configuration files to edit.  That was many years
! ago.
! 
! I think it is also legitimate to imagine that someone will erase
! the config/ directory before rerunning ./configure with
! different options, thinking that config/ was holding the
! configuration computed by ./configure.
! 
! You probably won't do this mistake twice, but the possibility to
! do it once is one reason I don't want to use such an ambiguous
! name.
!
! For me, a directory named config/ should be either related to
! configure, or contain configuration file.  Presently the AUX dir
! has almost nothing to do with configure (who only use a couple
! of files therein).

and in http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf-patches/2005-03/msg00017.html:

! config-aux/ dir is coherent with how this directory was used 10 years ago.
!
! djm indeed called this the directory for "configuration auxiliary files".
! 
! This is no longer the only purpose of this directory nowadays,
! keeping this sense is misleading.

> This change is wrong: m4.m4 will only be distributed automatically with
> Automake versions >= 1.8, but you didn't change the minimum Automake
> version from 1.7.9 in configure.ac.

Indeed I didn't assume that the people making an autoconf release would use
any automake version < 1.9.6 :-) Feel free to correct things where my patch was
wrong. I'm not a regular autoconf contributor, you know.

Bruno