Akim Demaille writes:
> This is why I would like to reiterate a proposal I made: get rid of
> AC_CANONICAL_{BUILD, TARGET, HOST}, and provide only
> AC_CANONICAL_SYSTEM.
I don't think this buys anything. First let me say that this "target"
thing is about the most confusing thing about Autoconf documentation and
concept-wise, especially when thrown together with build and host. The
latter two configure the build process to some extend or other. Target is
really just another option to configure the runtime behaviour of the
package to be built. As such it should probably be more something like
--enable-target, but I won't get into that now. But anyway, it's a highly
specialized option that should not be available or listed in the help
output unless someone explicitly asked for it, using AC_CANONICAL_TARGET,
in the same way --with-x isn't listed if you don't ask for it. But in any
case it shouldn't be merged with build and host just because they take the
same kind of option argument.
If you want to make a change I'd claim that it would be much more logical
to get rid of AC_CANONICAL_SYSTEM instead and let people explicitly call
CANONICAL_{HOST|BUILD} if they want information about the host or build
system, whyever they would need that. It's just as bogus to list --build
as an option if you don't actually evaluate it (or don't even care, as is
probably the case most of the time).
Of course that puts us back to square one of leaving everything as is. I
don't really believe that recognizing that AC_CANONICAL_xyz was called and
adjusting the help output accordingly should prove exceedingly difficult.
I can take a stab at it if you don't want to.
--
Peter Eisentraut Sernanders väg 10:115
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 75262 Uppsala
http://yi.org/peter-e/ Sweden
