Re: [PATCH] Honor configure's htmldir switch

Christoph Thompson [off-list ref] writes:

[administrivia: why do you keep dropping git@vger from Cc???]

I was under the impression that configure passed on the value of it's
--htmldir switch by doing
some substitution work like the following :

sed 's|@htmldir@|$(htmldir)|g' config.mak.in > config.mak

The information flow goes more like this:

 * configure.ac is used to generate the configure script with
   autoconf;

 * configure script is driven by the user and finds the system
   characteristics and user's wish;

 * what configure found out is used to generate config.mak.autogen,
   using config.mak.in as a template; and then

 * the primary Makefile reads config.mak.autogen if exists and then
   config.mak if exists.

Note that use of ./configure is entirely optional for the build
system of Git.  You can give parameters to make on its command line
(without having config.mak or config.mak.autogen), or you can give
these parameters in handwritten config.mak and just say "make".

You can also use ./configure to write some reasonable values in
config.mak.autogen, but if ./configure guesses things incorrrectly,
you can still override them in your handwritten config.mak exactly
because it is read after config.mak.autogen is read by Makefile.