With the recent additions I made to README, I noticed that we're maintaining a lot of duplicated redundant information, and also that README and README.alpha have needlessly drifted apart, effectively hiding useful information from users of our alpha and stable release tarballs.
All but the last patch in this series consolidate the differences between these two files to make sure all the useful README details are shipped in both alpha and stable releases. At that point, the only difference remaining is the wording of the very first paragraph - rather than having to make future additions to both files, I've deleted README.alpha and replaced it with a dist-time sed script which edits the README file in situ to contain the alpha wording, along with a change to the Makefile dist-hook rule to call it. Tested by inspecting the contents of README in a tarball after `make dist' with the AC_INIT version number set to 2.2.11a and 2.4.0 respectively. Okay to push? Cheers, -- Gary V. Vaughan (g...@gnu.org)
