I am using automake 1.13.3. I noticed in the manual the following sentence in the section on building static libraries, which I do for my project with libgnu.a:
You should call 'AC_PROG_RANLIB' from your 'configure.ac' to define 'RANLIB' (Automake will complain otherwise). I call AM_PROG_AR, and as far as I can see from the placement in my generated configure, that seems to be sufficient to define RANLIB; AC_PROG_RANLIB doesn't seem to be needed. At least, I get no errors, and the library is built. Can this sentence therefore be removed from the manual? I checked, and it is still present in current git. -- http://rrt.sc3d.org
