[TriLUG] autotools / automake trouble on Debian

Ryan Leathers ryan.leathers at globalknowledge.com
Wed May 17 13:27:50 EDT 2006


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
> 
> 




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