On 14.04.2017 07:09, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
[...]
> When / by whom exactly are these files created ?

When configure is run.
By configure.

> Is there any way to
> teach automake+frieds to generate them (via configure.ac etc), w/o
> complaining and w/o the need of extra preparations and special
> commands ?

configure already generates this. No idea what "complaining", "extra
preparations", nor "special commands" you mean. (Well, ok, perhaps the
empty files: This just

It should be generated by the macros from build/aclocal.makefile.m4
("These are the facilities for generating Makefile.am.features[...]").
The macros are called by build/configure.ac.features which is
m4_include'd by configure.ac.

So it seems that this needs configure to run. As a side effect this
generates the proper files. Then you need to run automake again so that
the proper Makefile.in is created. Which means you need to run configure
again...

> Therefore, these files *really* should always be autogenerated and
> strictly kept out of the src tree / tarball.

They are autogenerated. "make dist" adds it to tarballs since the file
is included by something.

Uli
--
“I’m Olaf and I like warm hugs.”