More on CVS layout

[Peter Simons]

Hi,

the "ac-archive" tree in CVS currently has the following
layout:

  legacy/
    am_support/
    c_support/
    cross_compilation/
    cxx_support/
    f90_support/
    installed_packages/
    java_support/
    misc/

This structure stems from the fact that the original version
of the generation software would use the name of the
directory where the m4 file is located to determine the
category of the macro.

In the new version, however, there is a @category directive
which must be stated in the macro, so that limitation is
gone. Furthermore, you may give _more than one_ @category
for each macro now.

This raises the question of how to organize the CVS tree
from now on. Keeping the macros in a directory that denotes
their (main) category is not very good system: When a macro
changes its category (because a new one has been created and
it's reassigned there from Misc, for instance), then the
file must be moved in the repository! This loses CVS history
information, the macro version is reset to 1.1, it is a
mess.

My suggestion, if nothing better comes up, is to put the m4
files  _flat_ into a single directory, for example:

  m4src/ax_foo.m4
        ax_other_foo.m4
        ax_java_bar_foo.m4
        ...

This way, there is no chance we'll ever have to move a file
to stay consistent. Furthermore, you can use the checked-out
repository with aclocal(1) without any modifications or
installation process. In the release archive, it is this way
already.

What other ideas are there? Anyone?

Peter