[Mailman-Developers] Small contrib script - Autoconf

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Lindsay Haisley writes:

 > > The bottom line is this is something that newer autoconf does and
 > > if your autoconf does it, I don't know a way to turn it off.
 > 
 > I looked at the code and that's kinda what I figured. Thanks

The autotools authors are *extremely* prescriptive, and try to
implement as much of the "GNU standard" in code as they can.  The
first macro in an autoconf script is ac_init, which IIRC is
boilerplate setup and environment consistency checks.  Most likely one
of the next two or three macro invocations sets up the standard
options, and that will invoke a macro to set up these directories.  Or
it might be another layer deeper.  Generally the way to turn stuff off
is to unroll the macros and only use what you need.

All of the autotools stuff is deeply entwined.  I suspect we only use
autoconf, so surgery on the configure.in to only call the stuff we use
is probably OK.  But if we use anything like automake, it's likely
there will be ripple effects if you remove GNU standard setup as Make
variables that are defined by the standard and used in the Makefile go
undefined.

It's probably not worth doing more.

Steve