Re: On aclocal.m4

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
> aclocal comes with automake as does the AM_PROG_MISSING macro that
> configure uses now. Note that this does not mean that anyone working on
> configure.in needs to have automake installed, only those that are adding
> external macro definitions.

... or editing existing ones to fix bugs ... in practice, as you push
more of configure's functionality into macros (which I agree is nice
from a readability standpoint) it will become almost impossible to work
on configure without modifying config/*.m4.

As things stood over the weekend, even just pulling from CVS required
automake, since aclocal.m4 may or may not get a newer timestamp than
the config/*.m4 files.  I temporarily diked out the toplevel make
dependencies that tried to update aclocal.m4, but the issue needs
discussion.

I'd like to be convinced that automake is actually going to be a win
for Postgres before we start requiring developers to have it.
        regards, tom lane