On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 04:07:02PM +0100, Mark Wielaard wrote: > On Tue, 2020-12-15 at 17:40 +0300, Dmitry V. Levin wrote: > > Makefile.am already contains "ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I m4", > > that is enough for autoreconf to do the right thing. > > But is that a good thing to rely on?
Looks like that's the common practice nowadays. > The autoconf manual says "be aware that future Automake releases might > start flagging ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS as obsolescent, or even remove > support for it." > > And the Autotools Mythbuster says "The search path for local files, as > of version 1.13 of automake, is defined by the directories listed in > AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR and AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS arguments. Previously, it > was common to use a variable defined in Makefile.am (ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS) > to pass extra parameters to aclocal. This behaviour is deprecated and > will soon not be supported." > > So, might it not be better to keep AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4]) and remove > the ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS? Hmm, despite all these recommendation, virtually every project that uses automake also uses ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS, and very few use AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR. The documentation on AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR says that "you must also set 'ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I DIR'", so this might be the reason why AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR is not popular. We can keep AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR, while it doesn't help, it doesn't harm either. -- ldv
