Re: Getting srcdir in script executed using m4_esyscmd in AC_INIT

[Nick Bowler]

On 2021-01-05, Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote:
> Something I found which surprised me is that Automake has added a GNU
> COPYING file to my non-GNU non-GPL package.  Once the file appeared in
> the source directory, it seems that it continued to be used and
> included in spite of the Automake options provided.

Yes, this particular behaviour of Automake is very annoying.  There is
a fairly long list of filenames that have nothing to do with Automake,
which matching files get automatically included in the distribution
tarballs whenever they are present in your workspace.

If Automake is run in foreign mode it shouldn't be creating COPYING
or INSTALL though.  I assume Automake pulls the AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
arguments from m4 traces, so perhaps while converting configure.ac
something got messed up and it was accidentally run in the default
GNU mode, where it can and will create these files with --add-missing.

Cheers,
  Nick