Re: macro: guidod/patch_libtool_on_darwin_zsh_overquoting.m4

[Peter Simons]

Guido Draheim writes:

 > well, they were dropped from the cvs, not just marked obsolete ;-)

At the time they were dropped (for the lack of documentation), there
was no such thing as an "obsolete" macro. :-) Feel free to add them
again.


 > AX_PATCH_ macros would confuse people to use them as freely as
 > others.

I personally would prefer to have them in the archive with the AX_
prefix. Limitations about when or where to use them should be stated
in the documentation, IMHO.


 > How to enable autoconf mode automatically if not with '-*-' ?

I could always add some code to recognize this in the formatter and
skip the special marker. Even though it would probably be better to
introduce a syntax that is genuinely ignored by it; such as 

    dnl# foo bar

or something along those lines. I'd prefer to make this change at a
later stage, though, because right now I am not sure what role the
legacy format should play in the future anyway. Moments ago I just
spent an hour hunting a formatting-problem with turned out to be that
someone used <tab> rather than <space>, and those problems are simply
_non-existent_ with the XML format.

I haven't really thought this through yet, but I feel that it might be
best to allow the legacy format for submissions -- because it is nice
and easy --, but to use the XML format only internally. (We can
convert one to another semi-automatically.)


 > Perhaps this is a good occasion to remind of the adoption of a
 > @category annotation in the non-xml submission format that could
 > list (a) multiple categorizations 

Are we sure that we _really_ want to have macros sorted into multiple
categories? Currently, the XML format does not permit this either, and
I am not yet convinced that this would be a good idea. Allowing
multiple categories would mean that the user would have to specify the
category in the submission text (possibly several of them) and I can
guarantee that half of all submission will have them spelled wrong.


 > and (b) status information as `obsolete` or `experimental` markers.

IMHO "obsolete" is a category as well. If a macro is obsolete, it is
moved from say "cxx_support" to "obsolete" and that's it. As for
"experimental": Should we include experimental macros (whatever that
is :->) in the archive at all? I thought that we were moving in bold
steps towards the goal of having _reliable_ macros in the archive?

Anyway, we could simply keep macros in the "candidate" category for an
more or less unlimited time, until the author (and the reviewers) are
sure that it should be sorted into the main archive.

Peter