Make distclean and distcheck (was: [PATCH 1/1] fix make distclean)

[Hynek Hanke]

Hello all,

while preparing the 0.7.1 i noticed it can't be build with make 
distcheck due
to some problems in the autotools scripts, such as Makefiles and 
configure.in.

It would be superb if we fixed that!

Not only would we have a much cleaner build and install procedure
(being nice to the distribution package maingainers), but we could also
use make distcheck to check that our release tarballs are OK.

The patch "fix make distclean" goes part of the way. I propose to separate
it into two: Distclean fixes, which are pretty straightforward, can be 
applied
as soon as the patch is re-submitted. Internationalization in the 
documentation
can be done later, when we resolve the encoding issue.

I've tried applying this patch in the 0.7 branch without the encoding 
change,
there were however still problems with building out of the source tree. 
In the
0.7 branch, we use Setup tools to install python and they currently 
expect all
sources be in the source tree. However, the generated paths.py file (with
configure-specific paths settings) is only available in the build tree. 
I expect
now that we are using autotools instead of setup.py in master, this can 
easily
be fixed in master.

It however remains to see if there will be any further problems discovered
with make distcheck. Any help is highly appreciated! It would be really nice
if we could pass make distcheck for 0.7.2 or 0.8.

Best regards,
Hynek Hanke