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Autoconf Archive TODO -*- mode:org;fill-column:79; -*-

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Mark obsolete macros as such in the texinfo documentation

Improve submission guide lines on the web site

Patch submissions should put the original authors on Cc.

Everyone is welcome to submit patches, bug reports, or suggestions to the Autoconf Archive. If you do, please add the original authors to carbon-copy list in the patch tracker. You don’t have to, if you don’t want to look their addresses up, but it’s considered good practice to give the other authors a heads up when the macro is being changed.

If possible, submit patches with Git.

Give a usage example for git format-patch.

If you have an account Savannah, simply request access to the Autoconf Archive’s repository so that you can use git push.

Recognize cross-links in macro documentation.

Macros often refer to other entries in the archive. The macro2texi scripts should recognize those references and generate appropriate links in the output.

The implementation of this feature is not as simple as it may sound, because Texinfo doesn’t offer plain and simple cross-references. There is @xref, of course, but use of that macros inserts additional words into the text! The reference @xref{Node}, for instance, is rendered as *Note Node. This property makes it very hard to insert references automatically.

Recognize URIs in macro documentation.

Some macros feature http or mailto URIs. The generator scripts should recognize those and generate appropriate hyperlinks output (where feasible).

Re-enable disabled sc_* checks from maint.mk [0/6]

Gnulib wants us to use spelling “file system” and objects when it sees the name ax_boost_filesystem in autoconf-archive.texi. There ought to be a way to avoid that error.

Progress: The bootstrap.sh script disable those checks that don’t work well for this project. In order to get on, though, some meaningful tests were disable, too. We should re-enable those and fix the macro contents to comply with those rules:

  • [ ] sc_copyright_check
  • [ ] sc_error_message_uppercase
  • [ ] sc_file_system
  • [ ] sc_GPL_version
  • [ ] sc_m4_quote_check
  • [ ] sc_prohibit_always-defined_macros
  • [ ] sc_prohibit_always_true_header_tests
  • [ ] sc_prohibit_doubled_word
  • [ ] sc_prohibit_magic_number_exit
  • [ ] sc_prohibit_strcmp
  • [ ] sc_prohibit_test_minus_ao
  • [ ] sc_space_tab
  • [ ] sc_useless_cpp_parens

Don’t repeat license texts in Texinfo for every macro

The Texinfo documentation has a section “license” for every macro that contains the complete license disclaimer. In case of the all-permissive license, that’s no big deal because that license is very short. In case of GPL + Autoconf exception, however, this leads to a significant amount of redundancy in the generated documentation.

It would be desirable to have the license texts in the documentation once and to have every macro refer to the appropriate section.

Update infrastructure files from gnulib

Most of our infrastructure files come from the Automake versions that’s used to run autoreconf -i. However, there are newer files in gnulib that we should use instead: install-sh got a minor update, ditto the INSTALL file. texinfo.tex has also been updated.

Karl Berry suggested using gnulib/config/srclist-update to keep those files synchronized.

Write a script that generates copyright lines from Git

We have a bunch of administrative files, such as configure.ac or Makefile.am, and those files need some sort of copyright statement. The usual approach is to use “Copyright (c) 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.”, like this file currently does, but that statement is not accurate, because the rights haven’t been actually signed over to the FSF. Instead, it would be nice to generate proper copyright lines from the Git repository, using the authors and date stamps of the commits that modified the file. To some extend, that script could be used to maintain copyright lines in the macros, too, but unfortunately the macro history isn’t all too reliable, because oftentimes the “author” of git commit is not necessarily the actual author, but merely the maintainer who’s, well, committing it. For the administrative files, however, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Generate HTML pages for obsolete macros and index pages [0/173]

Update macros licensed under old GPL+AC-Exception terms to version 3.0 [0/173]