Handling of extra macros

[Ross Boylan]

I've seen conflicting advice about how to handle extra macros, whether
developed locally or from the archive.  What's the best way to get them
into configure?  I think this reduces to the question of how to make
aclocal aware of them.

1. AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR doesn't work, according to prior posts on this
list, my tests, and, ambiguously, the manual (which refers to future
versions).

2. The man page for aclocal on my (Debian) system says  "At startup,
aclocal scans all the .m4 files it can  find,  looking  for macro
definitions.  Then it scans configure.in.  Any mention of one of the
macros found in the first step causes that macro, and any macros it in
turn requires, to be put into aclocal.m4."  This doesn't seem to be the
case, even if the file is in the same directory as configure.ac.  Or one
could say the quoted description is true, but aclocal can't find macros
in the project directory.  Either way, it doesn't work.

3. Other advice says to stick the macros in aclocal.m4.  I did, but they
got overwritten the first time aclocal ran.

4. If I put the macros in a directory and do
   aclocal -I thedirectory
things work, but this seems to be asking for trouble.

5. The autoconf manual has no index entry for aclocal.  There is one for
aclocal.m4, and the text refers to aclocal.  Is aclocal deprecated?

I have Debian autoconf 2.59a-7 and am looking at the manual for 2.59,
dated 5 Nov 2003 (direct from GNU).  I've also been looking at the
somewhat dated "Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool" book.  I'm not using
automake.
-- 
Ross Boylan                                      wk:  (415) 514-8146
185 Berry St #5700                               address@hidden
Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics           fax: (415) 514-8150
University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, CA 94107-1739                     hm:  (415) 550-1062