Normalization include:
- Use dnl for everything that can be ommitted when configure is built in
favor of the shell comment character # which is visible in the output.
- Line length normalized to 80 columns
- Dots for most of the one line sentences
- Macro definitions include similar pattern header comments now
The acinclude.m4 file is in a usual Autotools build processed with
Automake's aclocal tool. Since PHP currently doesn't use Automake and
aclocal this file can be moved into the build directory. PHP build
system currently generates a combined aclocal.m4 file that Autoconf
can processes automatically.
However, a newer practice is writing all local macros in separate
dedicated files prefixed with package name, in PHP's case PHP_MACRO_NAME
and putting them in a common `m4` directory. PHP uses currently `build`
directory for this purpose.
Name `php.m4` probably most resembles such file for PHP's case.
PHP manually created the aclocal.m4 file from acinclude.m4 and
build/libtool.m4. Which is also not a particularly good practice [1], so
this patch also removes the generated alocal.m4 usage and uses
m4_include() calls manually in the configure.ac and phpize.m4 files
manually.
- sort order is not important but can be alphabetical
- list of *.m4 files prerequisites for configure script generation
updated
- Moving m4_include() before AC_INIT also removes all comments starting
with hash character (`#`) in the included files.
[1] https://autotools.io/autoconf/macros.html
