Re: serial number format

[Sam James]

Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> I've not been a fan of those .m4 serial numbers, which may help to
> explain why so many .m4 files lack them. Although I still have doubts
> whether they're worth the trouble, perhaps it'd help if we added a
> file m4/.dir-locals.el (or something similar) that would cause Emacs
> to update these serial numbers automatically.

Not quite it, but autoconf-archive has some tooling around it:
* 
https://github.com/autoconf-archive/autoconf-archive/blob/81e26138e807b9ecb3c19b953e8776ff9e415fdf/macro.py#L112
* 
https://github.com/autoconf-archive/autoconf-archive/blob/81e26138e807b9ecb3c19b953e8776ff9e415fdf/set-serial.sh#L20

Maintainer mode is integrated with this so it updates serial numbers
automatically.