title: What's the point of aclocal?
body: <p>What's the point of the <strong>aclocal</strong> script and <strong>aclocal.m4</strong> file, in context of using autotools to configure source files? From what I read, aclocal scans macro files for macros that are later used by automake. I don't understand this process in depth, but it seems that the scanning functionality could have just been embedded into automake. </p>