Re: building with older Automake

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Eric,

* Eric Blake wrote on Wed, Dec 05, 2007 at 02:55:06PM CET:
> 
> Either texinfo.tex should not be tracked in autoconf's git, or automake
> should be taught how to grab the latest versions at the time it is invoked
> (rather than the version as it existed when automake was released), or we
> teach automake to leave texinfo.tex

FWIW, it does that unless you use --force.

> alone since we maintain it externally
> (by copying it from gnulib).  My patch did the latter option.

What difference does that make from saying: My Automake version is older
than my gnulib version?  What makes this issue different for texinfo.tex
than for config.guess, config.sub, missing, install-sh?

> I'm also thinking it might be nice if automake provided a witness macro on
> whether it supports the dist-lzma option, so that we can write autoconf's
> configure.ac to conditionally enable dist-lzma if the version of automake
> is new enough, rather than introducing a hard dependency on (as yet
> unreleased) automake.

I suppose if you write such a macro to detect presence of options for
Automake, that would be nice to have.  For now, I guess we can put
something like this in our Makefile.am:

mydist: dist
        -$(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) dist-lzma

to have `mydist' produce the available formats.

Cheers,
Ralf