Utterly hideous new approach to extracting install-sh from the

autoconf/automake edifice, since my previous approach of guessing
its pathname turns out not to work on at least one kind of system.

[originally from svn r7984]

mkauto.sh

@@ -3,6 +3,41 @@
 # It's separate from mkfiles.pl because it won't work (and isn't needed)
 # on a non-Unix system.
 
-# Track down automake's copy of install-sh
-cp `aclocal --print-ac-dir | sed 's/aclocal$/automake/'`/install-sh unix/.
-(cd unix && autoreconf  && rm -rf aclocal.m4 autom4te.cache)
+# Persuade automake to give us a copy of its install-sh. This is a
+# pain because I don't actually want to have to _use_ automake.
+# Instead, I construct a trivial unrelated automake project in a
+# temporary subdirectory, run automake so that it'll copy
+# install-sh into that directory, then copy it back out again.
+# Hideous, but it should work.
+
+mkdir automake-grievous-hack
+cat > automake-grievous-hack/hello.c << EOF
+#include <stdio.h>
+int main(int argc, char **argv)
+{
+    printf("hello, world\n");
+    return 0;
+}
+EOF
+cat > automake-grievous-hack/Makefile.am << EOF
+bin_PROGRAMS = hello
+hello_SOURCES = hello.c
+EOF
+cat > automake-grievous-hack/configure.ac << EOF
+AC_INIT
+AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(hello, 1.0)
+AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile])
+AC_PROG_CC
+AC_OUTPUT
+EOF
+echo Some news > automake-grievous-hack/NEWS
+echo Some text > automake-grievous-hack/README
+echo Some people > automake-grievous-hack/AUTHORS
+echo Some changes > automake-grievous-hack/ChangeLog
+rm -f install-sh # this won't work if we accidentally have one _here_
+(cd automake-grievous-hack && autoreconf -i && \
+  cp install-sh ../unix/install-sh)
+rm -rf automake-grievous-hack
+
+# That was the hard bit. Now run autoconf on our real configure.in.
+(cd unix && autoreconf && rm -rf aclocal.m4 autom4te.cache)