porting to gentoo: m4 files breaks automake

[Natanael Copa]

Hi,

I'm trying to port upstart to gentoo. It was pretty straight forward to
make an ebuild for gentoo to get it compiled and installed.

But after installing upstart, almost every other package that needs to
run autoreconf failed on aclocal.

Here is an example:
***** aclocal *****

/usr/share/aclocal/pstoedit.m4:7: warning: underquoted definition of
AM_PATH_PSTOEDIT
  run info '(automake)Extending aclocal'
  or see
http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#Extending-aclocal
/usr/share/aclocal/compiler.m4:28: file `m4/misc.m4' does not exist


It took me some while to find out that this was related to the upstart
installation. Some digging showed that the misc.m4, compiler.m4 and
linker.m4 got installed in /usr/share/aclocal and compiler.m4 and
linker.m4 will look for misc.m4 in m4/ subdir. Since I dont have any m4/
subdir on my system, every other package that tries to use aclocal
fails.

Since there is a:

  ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I m4

in Makefile.am, wouldn't it make more sense to include 'misc.m4',
instead of 'm4/misc.m4'?

I'm no automake/m4 guru, but the way it works now will break your system
by default. (unless you run debian/ubuntu?)

Please CC me if answering, I'm not on the list.

--
Natanael Copa