Re: Getting srcdir in script executed using m4_esyscmd in AC_INIT

[Zack Weinberg]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 at 8:43 AM Bob Friesenhahn
<bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Jan 2021, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> >>
> >> Something which surprises me is that the distribution tarballs became
> >> noticeably larger.
> >
> > This is expected. The bulk of the increase is probably due to the test
> > programs used to probe for C and/or C++ 2011 support in the compilers.
> > There were also some fixes for compatibility problems that involved
> > emitting more code throughout the script. I can explain the
> > rationale for any piece of the diff between the old and new configure
> > scripts that you're curious about.
>
> To be clear, the size difference was intended to be due to the list of
> parameters passed to AC_INIT and AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE and re-autotooling.
> In fact this is still using Autoconf 2.69.

Oh, I misunderstood you.

> Something I found which surprised me is that Automake has added a GNU
> COPYING file to my non-GNU non-GPL package.  Once the file appeared in
> the source directory, it seems that it continued to be used and
> included in spite of the Automake options provided.
>
> While I see more detail sprinkled around the generated files, it seems
> that this COPYING file may be the biggest issue.

Hmm.  If you remove COPYING, make sure that you have `foreign` in
either `AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS` or the options list passed to
`AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE`, and then re-run automake --add-missing, does
COPYING come back?  My understanding is that automake --add-missing is
supposed to install a copy of the GPL *only if* it's in `gnu` mode and
can't find any other statement of licensing.

zw