Re: AC_FOREACH public?

[Keith MARSHALL]

Oops.  Forgot that GNU's list mailers don't set the Reply-to header
properly, (can this not be fixed?), and only replied privately to
Stepan.

----- Forwarded by Keith MARSHALL/LOR/GB/RM/Corp on 20-10-2005 11:44 AM 
-----


Keith MARSHALL
20-10-2005 11:20 AM


        To:     stepan kasal <address@hidden>@group
        cc: 
        Subject:        Re: AC_FOREACH public?

Stepan Kasal wrote:
>> address@hidden AC_FOREACH
>
> as I said earlier, I don't want to see AC_FOREACH in the documentation.

Why, for heaven's sake?  I know you said that this is now deprecated in
CVS, but you don't say why that should be.

I *like* autoconf, but, if I have one harsh criticism, it is that 
perfectly
good macro names are deprecated much too frequently.

> The name implies that this is ``the foreach'' for Autoconf, while it is
> more appropriate to use m4_foreach, in most cases.

And this implies that it is a macro for m4, *not* for autoconf.

> If m4_foreach_w is documented, then the silly name indicates that this
> is not ``the foreach''.

It certainly is a silly, and utterly ghastly name, IMHO.  If the previous
AC_FOREACH implementation is flawed, then by all means reimplement it the
way this silly thing does, but keep the elegant name that says "this is
an AUTOCONF macro".  Otherwise, let's just deprecate the name `autoconf'
itself, and call this "the m4 project for configure script generation".

Just my 2c.

Regards,
Keith.