[ACCEPTED]-What's the point of aclocal?-autotools
See Alexandre Duret Lutz's Autotools tutorial, a must read.
It contains diagrams explaining 31 how the different files of an autotools 30 project interact with each other and by 29 which tool they are used: configure, config.h, config.status, aclocal.m4 etc
EDIT: John 28 Calcote also explains the purpose of aclocal 27 and aclocal.m4 in the first chapter of his book about Autotools: Chapter 1: A brief introduction to the GNU Autotools:
The 26 aclocal utility is actually documented by 25 the GNU manuals as a temporary work-around 24 for a certain lack of flexibility in Autoconf. Autoconf 23 was designed and written first, and then 22 a few years later, the idea for Automake 21 was conceived as an add-on for Autoconf. But 20 Autoconf was really not designed to be extensible 19 on the scale required by Automake.
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Essentially, aclocal’s 18 job is to create an aclocal.m4 file by consolidating 17 various macro files from installed Autotool 16 packages and user-specified locations, such 15 that Autoconf can find them all in one place.
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However, the 14 latest documentation from both sets of tools 13 suggests that the entire aclocal/acinclude 12 paradigm is now obsolete, in favor of a 11 newer method of specifying a directory containing 10 m4 macro files. The current recommendation 9 is that you create a directory in your project 8 directory called simply m4 (acinclude seems 7 more appropriate to this author), and add 6 macros in the form of individual .m4 files 5 to this directory. All files in this directory 4 will be gathered into aclocal.m4 before 3 Autoconf processes your configure.ac file. Ultimately, aclocal 2 will be replaced by functionality in Autoconf 1 itself.
In my software, aclocal.m4 collects the various non-standard 17 Autoconf macros that I use during the builds 16 of my software. One such set of macros 15 deals with sub-second timing - choosing 14 the best of the available options (according 13 to some pre-determined criterion for what 12 is 'best'); another such set of macros deals 11 with the intricacies of the IBM Informix 10 ESQL/C compilation system as it has evolved 9 over the last two decades (it handles ESQL/C 8 5.20, where version 5.00 was released in 7 1990, and it also handles the latest versions 6 of IBM Informix ClientSDK 3.50 - which, much 5 to my chagrin, contains ESQL/C 3.50 even 4 though it was released in 2008).
So, aclocal.m4 is 3 for local macros that are not necessarily 2 part of regular Autoconf but which are used 1 by your specific software.
The link to John Calcote's article as given 7 by http://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/brief_introduction_to_gnu_autotools/. I would have commented on that post 6 but my reputation here is too low.
The essential 5 paragraph:
Essentially, aclocal's job is 4 to create an aclocal.m4 file by consolidating 3 various macro files from installed Autotool 2 packages and user-specified locations, such 1 that Autoconf can find them all in one place.
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