Automake violations of the gnu coding conventions

[K. Richard Pixley]

I notice that automake is currently generating Makefiles that violate 
the gnu coding conventions.  Specifically, it's generating rules for 
rebuilding "Makefile" from "Makefile.in" and "Makefile.in" from 
"Makefile.am" which requires automake.  And yet the gnu coding standards 
specify:

   The |configure| script and the Makefile rules for building and
   installation should not use any utilities directly except these:

        cat cmp cp diff echo egrep expr false grep install-info
        ln ls mkdir mv pwd rm rmdir sed sleep sort tar test touch true
     

Note that automake is not in this list.

Also, in the past, there were coding standards that prohibited Makefiles 
from writing into $(srcdir).  The problem here is that source code 
directories might be read-only as comes from a cdrom, or from a shared 
but not owned source directory, (perhaps on a network server).

Note that these problems are particularly troublesome when one uses a 
file transfer method for copying or moving source trees that doesn't 
necessarily retain last modification time stamps, like source code 
control systems, "cp", etc.  In these cases, the source directory 
becomes unbuildable.

My question today is... is there any hope of bringing automake generated 
Makefiles back into line with the GNU coding standards so that these 
applications will work once again?

I mean, I'll be happy to do the work and to submit diffs, but would such 
a change be accepted back into the automake code stream?

--rich