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.
• 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.