Feature #13946: Rename configure.in to configure.ac

• Status: Closed
• Assignee: -
• Target version: -

[colby (Colby Swandale)]

Hello ruby team!

In my quest to learn about Ruby-lang's src i was reading through autoconf's documentation and got a bit confused about where the autoconf script was for ruby trunk until i found this paragraph in chapter 3.1:

Previous versions of Autoconf promoted the name configure.in, which is somewhat ambiguous (the tool needed to process this file is not described by its extension), and introduces a slight confusion with config.h.in and so on (for which ‘.in’ means “to be processed by configure”). Using configure.ac is now preferred.

trunk is currently using configure.in - so i would like to propose we rename configure.in to be the preferred configure.ac. I think this is good and will help reduce confusion for anyone reading documentation for autoconf.

Thank you!

[shevegen (Robert A. Heiler)]

If there are no side effects of problems then this may be fine. I can't say
though since I know next to nothing about the various files used by GNU
autoconfigure.

[normalperson (Eric Wong)]

[e-mail] wrote:

trunk is currently using configure.in - so i would like to
propose we rename configure.in to be the preferred
configure.ac. I think this is good and will help reduce
confusion for anyone reading documentation for autoconf.

Sure, there should be no compatibility problems, even (though I
wish you had researched this yourself :).

We already depend on autoconf 2.67 (released 2010-07-21)
and autoconf itself renamed it's configure.in to configure.ac
way back on 2001-07-17 (commit f0478c4702efe203fc22617966c4e5b934b8a0dc).

So there's no compatibility problems to worry about.

cf. git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/autoconf

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

• Tracker changed from Misc to Feature

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

• Status changed from Open to Closed

Applied in changeset trunk|r60062.

---

configure.ac

• configure.ac: renamed configure.in. [Feature #13946]

• Makefile.in, common.mk, ext/rbconfig/sizeof/depend: use
  configure.ac.

• README.ja.md, README.md: update document for configure.ac.

[kernigh (George Koehler)]

I had an old Makefile before I pulled this change (rename configure.in to configure.ac). The old Makefile can't find configure.in. The fix is easy: run autoconf and ./configure to get a new Makefile.

The error from an old Makefile looks like:

$ make
...
make: don't know how to make ../ruby/configure.in (prerequisite of: ../ruby/configure)
Stop in /home/kernigh/park/ruby-build

[znz (Kazuhiro NISHIYAMA)]

• Related to Bug #13039: build warning on 2.4-rc1 added

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

kernigh (George Koehler) wrote:

I had an old Makefile before I pulled this change (rename configure.in to configure.ac). The old Makefile can't find configure.in. The fix is easy: run autoconf and ./configure to get a new Makefile.

Or run ./config.status && make.

[duerst (Martin Dürst)]

• Related to Bug #13966: configure.in still needed ?! added