Re: prefix / Re: Masterplan

[Guido Draheim]

Peter Simons schrieb:
> Guido Draheim writes:
>
>         AX_ENABLE_DYNAMIC_LINKING
>         AX_HAVE_OPENGL
>
>     There is no need to have another prefix following the "AX", as in
>
>         AX_<author-initials>_HAVE_OPENGL

aaahm, not quite - remember we might need to change "names" of
macros quite heavily even when for the same target topic. Therefore,
we need a scheme to allow for a "family" of macros that target
the same problem area. _How_ that extra sibling attribution is
done, well, there are numerous ways, and I would not exclude
author-intials (or project intials) in either the middle or
appended.

However, there is a problem when being put directly after the
AX_, as it might clash with things like "AX_CHECK" or "AX_LIB"
or whatever handling-indicator. An author-initial must be
atleast lower-caps but that might break some tools - they
would not warn about unresolved macro expansions anymore as
they only check for bigcaps-only names in the configure
file.

Therefore, it should be recommended against such thing, and
a note be given to a reasoning page - making it a requirement,
well, I don't know if that is really beneficial. We had the
original scheme to accept a macro as is - aaargh, I am so
much inconclusive here. ;-/

>     because we enforce the uniqueness of macro names in the archive.
>     Any other naming scheme will not be accepted in order to minimize
>     the possibility of name clashes.
>
>     By the way, the "AX" is an abbreviation for "Autoconf Extension".
>
> Just for the sake of having an alternative, I would suggest
> considering the prefix "AMA" for "Autoconf Macro Archive" as well.

Please forgive me to shun the latter ;-) ... the problem is about
project names. Most registries like freshmeat and sourceforge and
savannah allow tri-char project names. So there might be a project
names "ama" which exports a macro named "AMA_CHECK_....". That
developer might not be aware of the ac-archive and the policy
around AMA. Well, if we would have registered the ac-archive
everywhere under the tri-char name "ama" :-)=) ... just kidding.

So, it'd be best to pick a two-char prefix, similar to the ones
in autoconf and automake.

-- cheers, guido