[TriLUG] autotools / automake trouble on Debian

[Ryan Leathers]

Thanks for the helpful reply Ed, and thanks to Richie Woodbury whose
suggestion was quick and successful.  In case anyone else runs into
something like this, here it is:

My Debian install was, it seems, more conservative than it needed to be.
It turns out I was missing some things needed to configure.  Richie had
me apt-get build-essential which made sure I had all the umm... well..
essentials.  After that my troubles were over, butterflies flitted
through my cube, and a rainbow emerged out in the parking lot leading
directly to five o'clock :)


   

On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 11:49 -0400, Ed Hill wrote:
> 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
> office:  MIT Dept. of EAPS 54-1424;  77 Massachusetts Ave.
>              Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
> emails:  eh3 at mit.edu                ed at eh3.com
> URLs:    http://web.mit.edu/eh3/    http://eh3.com/
> phone:   617-253-0098
> fax:     617-253-4464
> 
>