Re: m4-common

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

karaj,

On Wed, Feb 18, 2015, at 12:20, David King wrote:
> I am a maintainer of gnome-common and autoconf-archive in Fedora. The 
> current solution is to exclude the gnome-common versions of the M4 
> macros from being installed and for gnome-common to depend on 
> autoconf-archive for those macros. This is not a long-term option, as it 
> is easy for the macros to get out-of-sync.
>
> From a distribution point of view, m4-common sounds like more of a pain 
> than gnome-common has become, and I do not look forward to trying to 
> drag it through a package review (for a distribution where 
> autoconf-archive is already packaged).

After a bit more research today I think I've come up with a pretty
reasonable solution.

Each module should include:

  AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4])

in configure.ac (as is already recommended by libtoolize).

Then you should run 'aclocal -i' as part of your autogen.sh.

This will copy any autoconf-archive macros that you are using into your
m4/ directory and include them in the tarball.  This removes any
potential distribution headaches and means that we never have to dist a
m4-common tarball, either.

It's worth noting that as of a patch in September 2012, 'autoreconf -i'
will automatically call 'aclocal -i' as well, but autoconf hasn't been
released since April 2012, so that doesn't do us a lot of good at
present...

Cheers