Bryan Bennetts wrote: > So question #1 is should aclocal.m4 be in my distribution?
Strictly speaking, a user should not even need m4 installed at all (nor autoconf, nor automake, etc) to run the configure script and build the software. However common courtesy dictates that you should distribute any macros necessary to regenerate everything. And the maintainer rules that automake adds by default will cause problems if you don't. (You can avoid this by making maintainer mode require an explicit --enable-maintainer-mode with AM_MAINTAINER_MODE.) > If I do include the aclocal.m4, the configure *still* kicks off automake > because of a subdirs file that is created by configure being newer than the > configure.in, which the Makefile.in is dependant on. What exactly do you mean by a subdirs file? > So question #2 is WTF?! > > Thanks for any help you can provide - if there's more info you require please > let me know. I can send tarball of the app, just wasn't sure how well the > mailing list would handle it. I think the real question is how are you generating this distribution tarball? You should be using "make dist" and it should automatically include all the necessary files with correct timestamps so as to not require any developer tools on the end-user system. You might also want to run "make distcheck" and fix any problems that it reports. Brian