On 2021-01-05, Bob Friesenhahn <bfrie...@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
