21. The effect of ‘--gnu’ and ‘--gnits’

The ‘--gnu’ option (or ‘gnu’ in the AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS variable) causes automake to check the following:

• The files ‘INSTALL’, ‘NEWS’, ‘README’, ‘AUTHORS’, and ‘ChangeLog’, plus one of ‘COPYING.LIB’, ‘COPYING.LESSER’ or ‘COPYING’, are required at the topmost directory of the package.

  If the ‘--add-missing’ option is given, automake will add a generic version of the ‘INSTALL’ file as well as the ‘COPYING’ file containing the text of the current version of the GNU General Public License existing at the time of this Automake release (version 3 as this is written, http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html). However, an existing ‘COPYING’ file will never be overwritten by automake.

• The options ‘no-installman’ and ‘no-installinfo’ are prohibited.

Note that this option will be extended in the future to do even more checking; it is advisable to be familiar with the precise requirements of the GNU standards. Also, ‘--gnu’ can require certain non-standard GNU programs to exist for use by various maintainer-only rules; for instance, in the future pathchk might be required for ‘make dist’.

The ‘--gnits’ option does everything that ‘--gnu’ does, and checks the following as well:

• ‘make installcheck’ will check to make sure that the ‘--help’ and ‘--version’ really print a usage message and a version string, respectively. This is the ‘std-options’ option (see section Changing Automake's Behavior).
• ‘make dist’ will check to make sure the ‘NEWS’ file has been updated to the current version.
• VERSION is checked to make sure its format complies with Gnits standards.
• If VERSION indicates that this is an alpha release, and the file ‘README-alpha’ appears in the topmost directory of a package, then it is included in the distribution. This is done in ‘--gnits’ mode, and no other, because this mode is the only one where version number formats are constrained, and hence the only mode where Automake can automatically determine whether ‘README-alpha’ should be included.
• The file ‘THANKS’ is required.