I've recently submitted a patch to automake so that it can use shtool instead of the mkinstalldirs, mdate and install shell scripts. However, I think that for shtool support to be complete we need to support it in autoreconf as well, which I volunteer to do. To this end, I would propose a macro
AC_CONFIG_SHTOOL(scpp arx mdate) where the argument would indicate which shtool scriptlets we are interested in (so that autoreconf can pass it to shtoolize). This macro would expand to nothing, except maybe setting SHTOOL=$ac_aux_dir/shtool and AC_SUBST'ing it the first time it is called. The reason I am writing is to discuss this design so that I don't do the autoreconf work twice. Comments? Paolo
