Subject: bug#33166: automake --add-missing does not install config.rpath when AM_ICONV is used

From: Nick Bowler <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2018 16:12:29 -0400

On 10/26/18, Hans-Bernhard Bröker <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Am 26.10.2018 um 17:06 schrieb Stuart Caie:
>> Technically, AM_ICONV is not distributed with automake, and neither is
>> is config.rpath. However, automake recognises config.rpath as a special
>> file to distribute nonetheless.
>
> That's not really automake doing that.  That's done by gettextize and
> the autofoo code it adds to your project.

To be fair, Automake does have a special handling for config.rpath:
it will distribute a file with this name automatically if it is
present in the source tree, just like it does with files named
README, COPYING, etc.  But that's the extent of it.

(Aside: I've never liked this particular behaviour of Automake.
Especially in "foreign" mode, it's easy to miss adding files to
version control and it's possible nobody notices until someone
other than the original author runs "make dist", gets no error
whatsoever, and publishes a tarball without any README).