[Gnu-arch-users] Managing changes to projects that use autoconf/automake with tla

[Parker, Ron]

I was wondering how Tom and others handled their local commits to projects
that utilize automake and autoconf.

My situation is related to using diffutils in a nested project-framework
hierarchy.  It seems that when I "configure && make" the master project that
diffutils' aclocal.m4, config.hin, configure and Makefile.in get modified.
This isn't a problem, per se.  But it does result in about 13,000 lines of
"unnecessary" diff to diffutils.  These are diffs that I assume would differ
based upon the version of the auto tools on the machine where "configure"
was run.  My method to this point has been to revert these specific changes
before committing my quite minor changes to diffutils.

My question is this, am I just being pedantic by not checking in the changes
to these files?  Or should I not check in changes to them since others are
likely to be running a different version of autoconf/automake?  Is there a
better way to avoid committing changes to these files, while allowing them
to remain in their original form in the archive?