Hi,

It appears that some packages use the GUILE_FLAGS macro in their
configure.ac, and assume that they can get the necessary *.m4 files
through an invocation of 'autoreconf'. The Guile manual, by stating
  "Guile comes with additional Autoconf macros providing more
   information, installed as prefix/share/aclocal/guile.m4."
<https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Autoconf-Macros.html>,
implicitly suggested this approach.

But this approach does not work for two reasons:

  1) The GUILE_FLAGS macro relies on the AC_LIB_LINKFLAGS macro
     defined in lib-link.m4, that is provided by Gnulib
     
<https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Searching-for-Libraries.html>.
     It was never documented that lib-link.m4 would/could be
     available in PREFIX/share/aclocal/.
     The right way to get this file is through gnulib-tool,
     requesting the Gnulib module 'havelib'.

  2) The AC_LIB_LINKFLAGS macro relies on a file named 'config.rpath',
     that is also part of Gnulib. But 'autoreconf' does not copy this
     file. Only gnulib-tool copies it.

Starting with GNU gettext 0.24.1, lib-link.m4 is no longer installed
in PREFIX/share/aclocal/. So, the use of autoreconf will not pull in
a copy of lib-link.m4 any more. This is normal and expected.

Bruno




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