mkoctfile and autoconf in OctaveDE

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

I'm currently working on packaging OctaveDE for Debian (may the best
GUI win!), and have hit a bit of a snag with its build system.

Its build system currently uses $(wildcard ...) in its Makefiles,
which is a GNU extension, and not really kosher. This results in the
make install target failing because it attempts to copy directories
instead of contents. The fix here is pretty simple: list individual
files instead of using $(wildcard ...).

More severely, and if this is going to be a widely-used package, it
should get fixed, right now it sets variables from mkoctfile in
Makefile.am, when they really should be set in configure.ac, but I
think this necessitates writing the proper m4 macros for autoconf.

I think that Octave itself solves this problem by writing a mkoctfile
script in Makefile.in

My question is, am I correct that the right solution here is with m4?
I am thinking I should copy the pkg-config.m4 macros and modify them
to work with mkoctfile.

Thanks,
- Jordi G. .