[bug-hello] hello and current autotools

[Karl Berry]

Hi folks,

In trying to bring the Hello distribution up to date with modern
autoconf, automake, gettext, and gnulib, I am feeling rather adrift.
Please forgive me, I know some of this stuff has been discussed in the
past, but here are some questions:

- I think it was James or Simon who suggested having a separate gnulib/
  directory for gnulib m4 macros and/or code.  This seems very
  sensible.  Is this just a matter of using something like
    gnulib-tool --source-base=gnulib/lib --m4-base=gnulib/m4
  and arranging to compile/auto* in those dirs?  This is apparently what
  findutils does.
  
- How best to update the gnulib files once they are there?  I don't see
  anything in gnulib-tool to aid with this.  And what about files that
  aren't part of any gnulib module, like texinfo.tex and config.guess?
  Should I be using both srclist-update and gnulib-tool?  Seems wrong
  somehow.

- I heard in passing somewhere recently that m4/Makefile.am (I think?)
  was no longer needed.  Is the idea to simply remove m4/Makefile* and
  m4/Makefile from configure.ac?  It seems to work, but I thought I'd
  ask, anyway.

- the distribution as it stands has a separate directory for man pages
  (man) than the Texinfo manual (doc).  I'm not sure if that is better
  than putting them together, or worse.  Any opinions?

- What I have checked in now more or less works, for me anyway, but
  plenty of infelicities remain.  (Aside from the actual C code, which
  needs work too.)  

If you feel like looking at the code as it stands now, you can get it
via cvs -d:ext:address@hidden:/cvsroot/hello co hello,
or browse at http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/hello.

Thanks for any info ...

karl