In preparing m4-1.4.4b for release, I noticed that using the released version of automake 1.9.6 installed quite a number of out-of-date files, all of which could be found more up-to-date within gnulib, thanks to the cron jobs that keep gnulib CVS up-to-date with the various upstream sources of those files. For example, m4 is GPL, but m4-1.4.4b/COPYING installed by automake is missing the formatting touchups present in gnulib/doc/COPYING; likewise, the automake- installed version of config.guess was much older than gnulib/build- aux/config.guess. m4's Makefile.maint had a list of some of these files, and their various upstream repositories, and a wget rule that tried to update them, but that list was incomplete and depended on wget, even though I already had a fresh CVS checkout of gnulib with those same files already on my disk.
I was wondering if it would be worth teaching gnulib-tool about all the files that `autoreconf --install' normally installs, and then updating those files from gnulib's repository as part of `gnulib-tool --update'. That way, ad hoc rules in various Makefile.maint that try to wget the various files from various upstream sources, could then be simplified to just updating the gnulib CVS checkout and getting the latest version of the various files directly from gnulib. And by having gnulib track the list of files, there is less maintainence burden on keeping lists up-to-date within Makefile.maint of a particular project. -- Eric Blake
