On 26-12-2006 15:36:41 +0100, Stefan Manegold wrote:
There's simply one reason: "enforce" that /bootstrap is run before configure; and as usually, bootstrap creates configure from configure.* .
Why * = "ac" and not "ag" or "in" -- well, bascially because there are {Mx,mel,burg}/configure.ac, not {Mx,mel,burg}/configure.ag or {Mx,mel,burg}/configure.in .
Both, the top-level "bootstrap" & "configure[.ac]" are just wrappers that call the respective conifugre of Mx, mel, burg .
Looking into configure.ac, you might have noticed that it is not "real" configure.ac at all.
I think it's too challenging to write a script to check whether an .ac file really is an .ac file. Autoconf itself doesn't even do that.
If the .ac is a problem for some script, feel free to remane it too something else (configure.bs (for "bootstrap", i.e., the "tool" that eventually creates configure)?), but I'd prefer (in fact recommend) to not call it confiure (without extension) as that could suggest that no bootstrap is required, which is not the case.
I worked around it by just bootstrapping the separate directories and copying configure.ac to configure. That works for me, but still I find it confusing to find an .ac file which in fact isn't an ac file at all. (The same would hold if it would be called configure.in.)