[sane-devel] How best to distribute the m4 directory?

[Chris Bagwell]

Hi all,

I notice one of Fedora's patches against sane-backends-1.0.19.tar.gz is 
that they add back in the m4/ directory that is in CVS but not packaged 
by "make dist".  Thats because they need to rerun autoreconf to make 
some configure.in patches take affect.

Since we are distributing configure.in and acinclude.m4 (which 
references m4 directory), I'm assuming we should be packaging the m4 
directories as well.  As it stands, the end user needs to stop using 
released packages and go to CVS if they make any source code changes 
that require rerunning autoreconf.

I'd like to help resolve this issue but need some direction from 
whomever looks over the make infrastructure the most.  I see a few basic 
options.  #2 and #3 are my preferences.

1) Follow include/ directories lead and place a Makefile in m4/ 
directory so that its files can be packaged up.  Not sure how autotools 
will react to that but it probably ignores anything that doesn't end in .m4.

2) Change makefiles to be built using automake tools.  It handles the 
dirty work  pretty good.  It would also simplify the Makefile logic 
quite a bit.  Current Makefile.in look very much like a hand generated 
files based on how automake would do it anyways.  Any objections to 
using automake?

3) Port over latest automake logic for DISTFILES which supports path 
names and will both create these directories and copy files.  This would 
allow adding m4/byteorder.m4 and similar to toplevel DISTFILES in 
Makefile.in and would also allow removing the unneeded Makefile from the 
include/ directory and move its work to toplevel or src/ as well.

Chris