Hi Bruno. On Friday 08 July 2011, Bruno Haible wrote: > Ludovic Courtès wrote: > > ... having a reproducible way of > > producing tarballs, and user-specific environment settings appear to go > > counter this goal. > > Not only that. Also, it is important for distributors to be able to > regenerate the 'configure' file of packages, for a variety of reasons. > They can only do so if the tarball contains the _complete_ source code > of the configure file, that is, all the .m4 files that were used to > create it, except the .m4 files of Automake and Autoconf. > > Have you ever tried to rebuild the configure file of a package that > did not package pkgconfig.m4 or glib.m4? It's a nightmare. > > Therefore, please don't encourage maintainers to omit nontrivial .m4 files > from the tarball. Adding support $ACLOCAL_PATH would do exactly that. > Following your line of thinking, we should also drop the support for the `dirlist' special file then. The fact that a feature can be misused is IMHO not a good reason against its introduction, if it can also be used legitimately and profitably. Also, a conscientious user would anyway add `--install -I m4' to his ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS, so that third-party m4 files would be copied in the local m4 directory (and thus automatically distributed by automake).
I say we should instead follow the UNIX practice of giving the user enough rope to hang himself, but advise him not to do so; metaphors aside, this means we should implement $ACLOCAL_PATH, but also vouch your concerns clearly and strongly in the manual (as usual, patches welcome ;-) Regards, Stefano
