Comment 4 for bug 1272937

Following up on this bug since I got curious about its status. Ben, looks like the problem you hit with 12.04 is this Debian bug (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=565663) which apparently got fixed upstream between 12.04 and 14.04. I can see on the web that several projects do just create an empty "m4" directory in the source root directory, but 1) that's a workaround and 2) we would also have to work around git's behavior with empty dirs (which is brought up in the Debian bug conversation). In any case, since the project is deprecating 12.04 along with the next release, we might consider accepting Warren's patches as-is (assuming they work with Ubuntu 16.04 and supported Debian versions).