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

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 03/08/2010 05:55 PM, Peter Breitenlohner wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Mar 2010, Steffen Dettmer wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> IMHO, the only real reason to rename configure.in to configure.ac is, that
> some future Autoconf version may cease to accept the 'bugward' compatible
> old name.
Only partially.

Suffix rules/mime-types are the keywords you are looking for. Whether 
the files are named *.ac or *.in doesn't make much of a difference to 
autoconf, but to other tools, e.g. automake, GUIs, browsers, editors etc.

> Everything else is philosophy/ideology.
Well, I presume your C-sources are named *.jpg?


Ralf

PS.: Yes, I strongly think it's time for autoconf to bury configure.in. 
It's an anachronism worth to ditch, ASAP.