Currently, a large part of athena/{bin,lib} uses autoconf without automake, directly invokes libtool, and generally is very hard to maintain. Switching to automake, while updating the autoconf configure script, provide the benefits of make dist, allowing Athena to once again have a simple release process, as well as simplified Makefiles.
The general process for converting a package to automake is modeled by libathdir.
- First, move the source into src/, creating a deeper folder hierarchy if needed (see hesiod)
- Replace Makefile.in with Makefile.am
- Run autoscan to get suggestions about missing checks
- Ensure everything builds
The flags in configure.ac for libathdir are to be copied to all other packages. These include the maintainer mode, quiet build (note this should be disabled for Debian Packages), and the automake flags (foreign and -Wall are extremely important)