install-sh script not installed when using Autoconf alone

[John Calcote]

When Autoconf is used without Automake, 'autoreconf --install' doesn't 
install
a copy of the install-sh script when it detects the use of the 
AC_PROG_INSTALL
macro in configure.ac. There are two problems here:

First, while the Autoconf manual indicates that Autoconf ships with a 
version
of install-sh that project maintainers can use, this is not true. The
/usr(/local)/share/autoconf directory structure contains no copy of 
install-sh.

Second, Autoconf ships with the autoreconf utility that accepts an --install
option to install missing files. Yet, autoconf itself doesn't provide a
command-line option to install missing utility scripts, so autoreconf 
--install
cannot work properly without Automake.

The fact that autoconf doesn't accept an --install option would be okay, 
except
that autoscan adds AC_PROG_INSTALL to configure.scan, and the generated
configure script then fails when attempting to locate install-sh. Since 
Autoconf
doesn't really provide an install-sh script that can be hand-copied into 
the project
directory, you basically have to install Automake in order to get 
Autoconf to work
correctly, or remove the AC_PROG_INSTALL macro inserted by autoscan
from your configure.ac file.

Regards,
John