automake: Gnits

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1 22 The effect of ‘--gnu’ and ‘--gnits’
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1 The ‘--gnu’ option (or ‘gnu’ in the ‘AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS’ variable) causes
1 ‘automake’ to check the following:
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1    • The files ‘INSTALL’, ‘NEWS’, ‘README’, ‘AUTHORS’, and ‘ChangeLog’,
1      plus one of ‘COPYING.LIB’, ‘COPYING.LESSER’ or ‘COPYING’, are
1      required at the topmost directory of the package.
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1      If the ‘--add-missing’ option is given, ‘automake’ will add a
1      generic version of the ‘INSTALL’ file as well as the ‘COPYING’ file
1      containing the text of the current version of the GNU General
1      Public License existing at the time of this Automake release
1      (version 3 as this is written,
1      <https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>).  However, an existing
1      ‘COPYING’ file will never be overwritten by ‘automake’.
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1    • The options ‘no-installman’ and ‘no-installinfo’ are prohibited.
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1    Note that this option will be extended in the future to do even more
1 checking; it is advisable to be familiar with the precise requirements
1 of the GNU standards.  Also, ‘--gnu’ can require certain non-standard
1 GNU programs to exist for use by various maintainer-only rules; for
1 instance, in the future ‘pathchk’ might be required for ‘make dist’.
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1    The ‘--gnits’ option does everything that ‘--gnu’ does, and checks
1 the following as well:
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1    • ‘make installcheck’ will check to make sure that the ‘--help’ and
1      ‘--version’ really print a usage message and a version string,
1      respectively.  This is the ‘std-options’ option (⇒Options).
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1    • ‘make dist’ will check to make sure the ‘NEWS’ file has been
1      updated to the current version.
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1    • ‘VERSION’ is checked to make sure its format complies with Gnits
1      standards.
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1    • If ‘VERSION’ indicates that this is an alpha release, and the file
1      ‘README-alpha’ appears in the topmost directory of a package, then
1      it is included in the distribution.  This is done in ‘--gnits’
1      mode, and no other, because this mode is the only one where version
1      number formats are constrained, and hence the only mode where
1      Automake can automatically determine whether ‘README-alpha’ should
1      be included.
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1    • The file ‘THANKS’ is required.
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