[TriLUG] autotools / automake trouble on Debian

[Ryan Leathers]

This is Off Topic, and I think I'm close to solving it now anyway, but
for sanity sake...

The problem I'm having happens to be on Sarge, but I have no reason to
believe the OS is to blame in any way. My package selection, however, is
quite suspect.

I was trying to compile the jakarta tomcat connector.  I grabbed the
1.2.15 source from the jakarta site.  After extracting the contents of
the tarball, I tried to create a custom configure file by running the
provided buildconf.sh (see below)

#!/bin/sh

echo "rm autom4te.cache"
rm -rf autom4te.cache

echo "libtoolize --force --automake --copy"
libtoolize --force --automake --copy
echo "aclocal"
#aclocal --acdir=`aclocal --print-ac-dir`
#aclocal --acdir=/usr/local/share/aclocal
aclocal
echo "autoheader"
autoheader
echo "automake -a --foreign --copy"
automake -a --foreign --copy
echo "autoconf"
autoconf

echo "rm autom4te.cache"
rm -rf autom4te.cache
<eof>

Running this script resulted in the following:

libtoolize --force --automake --copy
aclocal
autoheader
automake -a --foreign --copy
configure.in: 8: `automake requires `AM_CONFIG_HEADER', not
`AC_CONFIG_HEADER'
autoconf
rm autom4te.cache

So, for some reason automake was barfing.  I thought the point of
automake was to sort out these kinds of things for you, but I'm not a
software guy so what do I know?  I ran apt-cache search / policy on
automake and noticed that even though there is a version 1.9 I was using
1.4 in my default install.  I installed 1.9 and to my disappointment it
didn't improve my results.  Finally, I happened to remove 1.4 and leave
only 1.9 installed (I had supposed the install of 1.9 had already done
this, but I hadn't payed attention).  Viola! the script completed
without error, but wait... there is more trouble.

I now thought I was ready to configure mod_jk so I ran this command:
./configure --with-apxs=/usr/bin/apxs2

at the end of the output I saw:
checking how to run the C++ preprocessor... /lib/cpp
configure: error: C++ preprocessor "/lib/cpp" fails sanity check
See `config.log' for more details.

So I opened config.log and found numerous lines like this:

conftest.c:11:28: ac_nonexistent.h: No such file or directory
configure:3930: $? = 1
configure: failed program was:
| /* confdefs.h.  */


Now, my question is, before I go any further, have I really solved the
problem with automake or is the problem just less obvious until I try to
configure?  I feel like I'm starting to chase my tail and it may be that
I just don't have the right packages installed for the job.

Thanks for comments and encouragement.

Ryan