Hello! It has occured to me that the complex "distcheck" procedure doesn't have to be integrated into Automake. In fact, "make distcheck" works with the tarball and treats it as a black box.
Automake knows a lot about most of the files and can generate rules that work with those files. But the whole idea of "make distcheck" it to make sure that the whole package behaves properly, including the custom rules not generated by Automake. I believe that a separate program for testing packages would be a much more flexible solution. You would be able to get a package from the net and check if that package behaves good, i.e. that it doesn't try to run autoconf or automake, respects DESTDIR and prefix, has all standard targets, passes "make check" and so on. You could use a new distcheck script on old packages. You would not have to run automake on it, and you would test the package as is, not what it would become after upgrading to the latest and greatest automake. The script could even produce a report about properties of the package (i.e. whether prefix and DESTDIR affect all files, passed make targets, failed make targets etc). I'm not saying that "make distcheck" support should be dropped from Automake any time soon, but having a standalone script would reduce the need in making "make distcheck" more and more complex, and especially the need in introducing any new Automake options affecting strictness of "make distcheck". At some point, "make distcheck" would simply call "make dist" and run the standalone "distcheck" script with predefined DISTCHECK_FLAGS. -- Regards, Pavel Roskin
