Re: [RFC + SIMPLE PATCHES] {maint} foreign mode and -Wportability

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello,

* Stefano Lattarini wrote on Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 05:24:19PM CEST:
> On Tuesday 05 October 2010, Andrew W wrote:
> > Excuse me, but commandline should always win over defaults, config
> > files, etc, IMO.

Right.  And AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS over configure.ac settings, generally.

> I agree, but unfortunately automake has not behaved like that for a
> quite long time (at least w.r.t. setting of gnu/foreign/... modes),
> and still doesn't today:

The question is why it behaves the way it does.  The answer lies
somewhere in the source code history and/or the mailing list archives.
I can dig it up for you but then it will take a couple of weeks ...
and it won't be much less work for me than it will be for you.  ;-)

I'm willing to reconsider the semantics of all the switches, and also
the portability settings and wrt w32 and so, but only once it is clear
why the code came to be the way it is; we should know what we break,
and why.

Cheers,
Ralf