Re: [Automake-ng] [PATCH] [ng] maint: rename automake -> automake-ng, aclocal -> aclocal-ng

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 04/14/2012 08:35 PM, Jim Meyering wrote:
> Stefano Lattarini wrote:
>> With the aim of avoiding confusion between Automake and Automake-NG as
>> much as possible, we rename the 'automake' and 'aclocal' scripts in the
>> 'ng/master' branch to 'automke-ng' and 'aclocal-ng' respectively, and
> 
> s/mke/make/
>
Well spotted, will fix.

>> adjust the testsuite and the automatic remake rules accordingly.
>>
>> * automake.in: Moved ...
>> * automake-ng.in: ... here.
>> * aclocal.in: Moved ...
>> * aclocal-ng.in: ... here.
>> * t/wrap/automake.in: Moved ...
>> * t/wrap/automake-ng.in: ... here, and adjusted.
>> * t/wrap/aclocal.in: Moved ...
>> * t/wrap/aclocal-ng.in: ... here, and adjusted.
>> * m4/init.m4, Makefile.am, configure.ac, bootstrap, defs-static.in,
>> t/get-sysconf.sh, t/location.sh, t/warnings-unknown.sh, .gitignore:
>> Adjust.
> 
> Hi Stefano,
> 
> Won't this cause trouble for those who want to use the new tools?
>
Yes, unless they create a couple of symlinks:

  automake -> automake-ng
  automake-0.5a -> automake-ng-0.5a

early in PATH.  Also, maybe we could add a configure option to have the
Automake-NG "make install" to do this automatically.  That could be easily
done in a follow-up patch.

Anyway, I think that such an inconvenience for the early adopters will be
a more than fair price to pay in order to avoid confusion and more bad
reputation for the autotools ("Gahhh, they have broken Automake backward
compatibility *again*!  I'm switching to CMake now!").

> Either they will have to rename the tools to remove the -ng suffix
> or somehow update all scripts that invoke "automake" and "aclocal"
> to use the new names.
>
In tho longish term, I want to add a new option 'ng' recognized only by
Automake-NG, and then patch autoreconf to invoke 'aclocal-ng' and
'automake-ng' when it sees this 'ng' option in the AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
call (patch for the first step coming up soonish, likely tomorrow).
Do you think this would be an acceptable route?

> I would prefer to leave the names unchanged.
> 
> For the record, I tried automake/aclocal built from the ng branch in
> cppi today.  Here is the very first change that was required in order
> to make it so ./bootstrap no longer failed:
> 
> [I would have much preferred to see that automake-ng uses a much larger
>  version number.  With the obligatory decrease to 0.5, I am forced to
>  let all older versions of automake pass these prereq tests.  ]
>
Some people are quite jumpy at the idea that we might try to force
Automake-NG on them through either a confusion of names or a dirty
trick with version numbers:

  <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake-ng/2012-02/msg00024.html>

So I'd rather be dumb and safe in this area.


Thanks for your early interest in Automake-NG,
  Stefano