[TriLUG] autotools / automake trouble on Debian

[Ed Hill]

On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 11:20 -0400, Ryan Leathers wrote:
> This is Off Topic, and I think I'm close to solving it now anyway, but
> for sanity sake...

[...snip...]

> 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.

Hi Ryan,

It looks like you're running into "version skew" with the auto-tools,
which is actually a pretty common problem.  New versions of autoconf,
automake, and libtool come out and they are NOT, in general, plug-in
replacements for older versions.  This can be quite frustrating for both
developers and packagers.

I understand that you're using Debian [which is cool--I'm not interested
in pointless distro comparisons today! :-)], but this is also a problem
for Fedora packagers.  Usually, when creating spec files for Fedora
RPMs, packagers will choose to patch the configure scripts "by hand"
rather than trying to generate new configure scripts using auto-tools
that will potentially be different than the ones used by the original
("upstream") developers.  Both approaches (by-hand patching of configure
versus wholesale regeneration of configure) can potentially work and
both approaches have their pros/cons.

If you have some bash skills or can find someone who does then I would
strongly suggest trying to patch configure "by hand".  If you can tell
us how configure is failing then folks on this list might be able to
help.  In fact, the patch might be very quick/easy/small while trying to
re-generate with different auto-tools versions may be a *much* more
difficult endeavor...

Hope that helps!

Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
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