Re: [patch] removal of dnl comments in configure.in

[Lars J. Aas]

On Thu, Oct 19, 2000 at 01:30:06PM +0200, Michael Livshin wrote:
: "Lars J. Aas" <address@hidden> writes:
: > configure.in comments should really be made with "#", not with the
: > m4 dnl macro.
: 
: the only difference being that comments marked with '#' are left as is 
: in the output and not elided by m4, right?
: 
: any reason to want this, other than to have the copyright present in
: the generated script?

You won't get the copyright statement in the generated script even now, since
anything above the AC_INIT macro is diverted to /dev/null if I'm not mistaken.

For one, the dnl-style commenting is a practice the autoconf developer core
team is trying to get rid of.  You won't find any left in the newer Autoconf
alphas, except where removing the newline is absolutely necessary.  I don't
know all the reasons, but dnl comments are both uglier and less useful than
# comments.  They can also cause non-obvious side-effects if you don't know
what the dnl macro really does (if you've just come to think of them as the
way to comment configure.in scripts)...

  Lars J