Once the package autotool'ed (voir Bootstrapping the Package), once you can run a simple make, then you should be able to run make distcheck to set up the package.
The mission of make distcheck is to make sure everything will work properly. In particular it:
Arguments passed to the top level configure (e.g., ./configure CC=gcc-3.2 CXX=g++-3.2) will not be taken into account here.
Running export CC=gcc-3.2; export
CXX=g++-3.2 is a better way to make sure that
these compilers will be used. Alternatively use
DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS
to specify the arguments of the
embedded ./configure:
$ make distcheck DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS='--without-swig CXX=g++-4.0'
If you just run make dist instead of make distcheck, then you might not notice some files are missing in the distribution. If you don't even run make dist, the tarball might not compile elsewhere (not to mention that we don't care about object files etc.).
Running make distcheck is the only means for you to check that
the project will properly compile on our side. Not running
distcheck
is like turning off the type checking of your compiler:
you hide the errors, you avoid them, instead of actually getting rid of
them.
At this stage, if running make distcheck does not create bardec_f-tc-4.tar.bz2, then something is wrong in your package. Do not rename it, do not create the tarball by hand: something is rotten and be sure it will break on the examiner's machine.