Re: [Libcdio-devel] Adding required m4 files

[Peter Creath]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 1:33 PM, R. Bernstein <address@hidden> wrote:
> Steven M. Schultz writes:
>  > On Mon, 9 Jun 2008, R. Bernstein wrote:
>  > > If you want to figure out how get auto* to exclude m4, by all means do 
> so...
>  >
>  >      My method would be to exclude the entire directory by requiring
>  >      properly configured systems if folks want to run ./autogen.sh :)
>  >
>  >      But what the heck, guess YET ONE MORE COPY of those m4 files on
>  >      the system won't matter ;)

Upon investigating this, it turns out that m4 lives in the tarball
because aclocal is including them rather than appending them to
aclocal.m4.  This is apparently the preferred behavior for automake.
Our new arrangement of placing required .m4 files in an m4 directory
we distribute is also discussed in
<http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/automake/Local-Macros.html>
(see the paragraph regarding "distribution of third-party macros").
So I think our change is a good one overall, especially since I
removed the superfluous libtool.m4.

While I was poking around automake, I also ran across this article
about the deprecation of aclocal and the recommendation to move from
autogen.sh to autoreconf:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/automake/Future-of-aclocal.html>.

What do people think about replacing the guts of autogen.sh with a
call to autoreconf?  I can check in a patch if nobody sees a problem
with this.

Also, do we have any strong feelings about maintainer mode?  This
seems to be deprecated now as well:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/automake/maintainer_002dmode.html>.
 It sounds like there are some reasons to still use it, but I don't
know if they apply to libcdio.  Rocky?