Subject: Maintainer for autoconf in git (was: [PATCH] autoconf: Add limited support for --htmldir)

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2009 10:30:35 +0100

On Sat, 28 Feb 2009, David Syzdek wrote:

> Are you more or less the maintainer of the configure.ac file?  Or is
> it more of a "hive" effort?  There are a few things that could be done
> to make the file a little more readable and maintainable.  For
> instance, breaking the macro functions into acinclude.m4 instead of
> keeping them in the configure.ac file.
> 
> I'd be willing to help or take the brunt of the work, but I would like
> to coordinate with someone whom is familiar with the interaction
> between the Makefile and configure.ac.
> 
> I have a decent amount of experience with using the autotools and am
> comfortable with autoconf.
> 
> Let me know if you think this is a good idea or not.

It is true that I have added [optional] support for autoconf to git,
and I think the idea of having optional ./configure support in the form
of generating configuration file for Makefile, overriding the guesswork
based on uname, and being overridden by user's customization is mine.

But I have next to no experience (except for the work on git) with 
autotools / autoconf. Additionally keeping up configure.ac and 
config.mak.in in sync with changes to Makefile (build system) needs
time which I don't have much of. So I very much would like for someone 
with better knowledge of autotools to take over maintaining configure 
for git.

The thing to remember is that ./configure has to be entirely optional...

P.S. On of things that autoconf needs to work better is to have fallback 
install-sh script in git sources... which I think also would help in 
the case where we do not use ./configure, but are on some legacy 
system.
-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland