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5.5 Writing your own aclocal macros

The aclocal program doesn’t have any built-in knowledge of any macros, so it is easy to extend it with your own macros.

This is mostly used for libraries which want to supply their own Autoconf macros for use by other programs. For instance the gettext library supplies a macro AM_GNU_GETTEXT which should be used by any package using gettext. When the library is installed, it installs this macro so that aclocal will find it.

A file of macros should be a series of AC_DEFUN’s. The aclocal programs also understands AC_REQUIRE, so it is safe to put each macro in a separate file. See Prerequisite Macros in The Autoconf Manual, and Macro Definitions in The Autoconf Manual.

A macro file’s name should end in .m4. Such files should be installed in `aclocal --print-ac-dir` (which usually happens to be $(datadir)/aclocal).