before i push, question about $scriptversion. is the policy for handling these documented somewhere ? is it like m4 serial numbers ? it should be updated whenever there's a code change ?
Yes. Standard practice is to update scriptversion whenever a new version of the file is committed, I mean, "pushed". This isn't documented anywhere in automake that I know of (feel free to add it to HACKING if you like); maybe it's in the gnulib manual, but I didn't check. --thanks, karl.