Re: A Closer Look at GNU AutoTools

[Gavin Smith]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 6:10 PM, Shawn H Corey <address@hidden> wrote:
> No, it's not a "natural" attitude. I have worked on open-source
> projects where this attitude is not present and on proprietary ones
> which had it in spades. It depends on the people involved. And it also
> drives people away from open-source projects.
>

Attitude is subject to interpretation. None of the autoconf
maintainers said they thought the documentation had to stay exactly as
it was. I am sure that there can be changes. I think that the best
chance for changes to happen is for the person seeing the problem to
make them themselves, and hope that other people agree. Unfortunately,
unless you give specific criticism, other people can easily overlook
the points you make and it tends to get forgotten about. As an
interested bystander, I hope you can work with the autoconf
maintainers to get a graphical flowchart into one of the manuals.

Remembering that "talk is cheap", here are my own changes that I made
to the autoconf manual, the "Manual Configuration" section, based on
the "autoconf.texi" file I got from the current git repository. If
anyone has any suggestions I will see about incorporating them. I
don't mind if someone else wants to use this to inspire their own
attempt.

(I have not updated cross-references to renamed nodes yet.)

Summary of changes:

Rename "Manual Configuration" to "Canonical System Types", as the old
name was meaningless
Rename "Canonicalization" to "Getting System Types"
Remove word "deliberately" from "Specifying Target Triplets" (it
doesn't matter to the reader what the motivation of the author was)
Move list of when to use system types from "Using System Types" to
higher-level node "Canonical System Types" to give a better overview
of this feature
Move explanation of when to use "target" from "Using System Type" to
"Getting System Types" so it is next to the presentation of the three
system types
Rewrite so that introducing "build_alias" etc. doesn't appear to be a
jarring change of subject
Change heading in "Getting the Canonical System Type" to "Getting
Canonical System Types in configure Scripts"
Change heading in "Using System Type" to "Examples of Using the System Type"

canonical-system-types.patch
Description: Text Data