Hi Bob. On Tuesday 16 August 2011, Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > On Tue, 16 Aug 2011, Stefano Lattarini wrote: > >>> > >> I'll have a "draft patch" read soonish. There is ample room for > >> improvements, > >> but I'll post it here anyway since it can benefit from early feedback. > >> > > Here it is. As usual, comments and suggestions welcome. > > The proposed documentation seems quite useful. It does have a flaw in > that it identifies 'make' programs based on the operating system where > they were currently found (e.g. "FreeBSD make"). The issues may > pertain to only certain versions of such make programs, or the 'make' > associated with an OS may be entirely supplanted (or optionally > replaced) with a 'make' which offers completely different behavior. > > What is useful information today may become 'lore' in a few years so > it would be good to add additional data so that the reader (and > documentation maintainer) knows the vintage of the information. > That's a good point. Do you think it would be OK to put such information only in Texinfo comments for the moment, and then, as a second and later step, devise a way to report it in the final manual too? This second step wouldn't be trivial IMHO, since we would need to present such version information in a way that is at the same time clear, non-obtrusive and complete (mabe we could take a look at how Gnulib does this?). Finally, as a third step, we might try to revisit the existing examples of bugs and portability pitfalls, and try to pin-point them to a precise version of the system/tools used (in case this version is not already reported).
Regards, Stefano _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
