automake-1.7b feedback (3)

[Bruno Haible]

Bug (regression) in the treatment of AC_CONFIG_FILES: When the source file
in an AC_CONFIG_FILES argument is a relative pathname starting with ../,
automake gets confused about this pathname: it behaves as if the pathname
were relative to a subdirectory, but the pathname is actually relative to
$(top_srcdir) where the configure.ac is located. To reproduce:

$ mkdir testdir
$ cd testdir
$ mkdir lib
$ touch lib/Makefile.am
$ touch lib/javacomp.sh.in
$ mkdir m4
$ touch m4/Makefile.am
$ cat > configure.ac <<EOF
AC_INIT
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(gettext-runtime, 0.12.2)
AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile])
AC_CONFIG_FILES([lib/javacomp.sh:../testdir/lib/javacomp.sh.in])
AC_CONFIG_FILES([m4/Makefile])
AC_OUTPUT
EOF
$ cat > Makefile.am <<EOF
SUBDIRS = lib m4
EOF
$ touch NEWS README AUTHORS ChangeLog
$ aclocal
$ autoconf
$ automake -a -c Makefile
$ automake -a -c m4/Makefile
$ automake -a -c lib/Makefile
configure.ac:5: required file `lib/../testdir/lib/javacomp.sh.in' not found

Two things are wrong here:
  - The line number in the error message points to the last AC_CONFIG_FILES
    invocation. But this is not the line containing the javacomp.sh rule.
  - The error is unjustified, because the file is to be found in
    ../testdir/lib/javacomp.sh.in

Bruno