Stefano and all, It would be nice to able to list directories in EXTRA_DIST. It is painful and unnecessary overhead to list every file in a contrib directory individually just to avoid including VC files. (As explained at http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html#Basics-of-Distribution.)
I don't propose any major surgery to make it work in every conceivable circumstance. All that is really necessary is to provide a way to pass --exclude-vcs to tar. It would only work with GNU tar, but that is ok. What worked for me is to override the definition of am__tar, like this in Makefile.am: am__tar = tar --exclude-vcs --format=ustar -chf - "$$tardir" Except I don't really want to put this into Makefile.am. Happily, this also worked from the command line: $ env am__tar='tar --exclude-vcs --format=ustar -chf - "$tardir"' make dist For that matter, it would be nice if am__tar provided a way to pass arbitrary extra options. Perhaps include something like $(AM_TAR_USER_OPTIONS) in the definition? Equivalently, provide a way to override the name "tar", as in $(AM_TAR_PROGRAM)? That might be simplest of all. Along those lines, it would be nice if Automake always used the -chf style above. In some distributions' Makefiles I've seen "chf" (didn't look into why); that prevents adding options though, due to the vagaries of tar command line parsing which we all know. I have the impression that every tar (except maybe really ancient ones, can't remember, but we don't care) supports the -style. Sorry for the brain dump of all these possibilities, but wdyt? k
