m4-common is a module to help with the installation of a subset of the
macros from autoconf-archive.  Its primary purpose is to be installed
early on, during a jhbuild.

Macros can be added to the list to be installed when things in the jhbuild
moduleset depend on them.

This module will never be released as a tarball, so users of these
macros are expected to ensure that they include copies of them within
their own tarball releases.

This can be accomplished by ensuring that this line is in your
configure.ac:

  AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4])

and by placing this in your toplevel Makefile.am:

  ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = --install -I m4


This will cause the macros to be copied into your m4/ directory at autoreconf
time.  From there, they will be automatically disted.


Eventually, 'aclocal --install' will be automatically run[1] as part of
'autoreconf -i', and the need for the ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS line will be removed, but
this is not supported in the latest released version of autoconf (2.69).

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf-patches/2012-09/msg00006.html