Re: aclocal question (AM_ICONV)

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Bill Moseley <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 15:12:33 -0700

> >It's a bad idea to rely on this, since it means that only you can
> >configure your package.  I would put those .m4 files into an m4
> >subdirectory of your package, and distribute those .m4 files.
> >Then you can use aclocal -I m4.  Most people do it this eay.
> 
> Shows how little I know.  I thought the point of aclocal was to bring in
> the macros into aclocal.m4 so that all others (that run autoconf) would
> need was that aclocal.m4 file.

Your understanding is correct.  But my point was that others might
need to be able to recreate your aclocal.m4, because they may (say)
need to modify iconv.m4.  Putting iconv.m4 into m4/iconv.m4 lets them
do that easily.  If iconv.m4 is instead extracted from a magic
location, outsiders won't be able to see or modify it.

> aclocal.m4 would be in cvs, but not in our
> tarball (the tarball would have configure already created).

Common practice is to put aclocal.m4 (as well as iconv.m4) into the
tarball, so that it is self-contained.  People should be able to do
development off your tarball.

> BTW -- the reasons for all these messages is that I'm trying to convert our
> (working) configure based project to use automake and libtool.  Does
> everyone find this a steep learning curve? ;)

Yup, unfortunately.  Most people look for examples of how it's done.
A good (though large) example is coreutils.

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-4.5.1.tar.gz