This is the mail archive of the cygwin mailing list for the Cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: autoconf problem on cygwin


Larry Hall wrote:

Is this a question? Is it rhetorical? If not, I would say that searching the email archives is always a good way to find out if others
have seen a problem you're having.

I think what sps was saying was, how was he supposed to know that he needed to be using automake-1.4 in the first place.


The answer is, running the autotools is not a job for the faint of heart. It is a maintainer task, not a "user" or "I download the source and want to run 'configure/make/make install'" task. Maintainer tasks require somewhat more knowledge about the package under discussion -- like "what version of autoconf/automake/libtool is the 'approved' version".

Now, there are ways to find this information out, short of simply asking on that project's mailing list. For instance:

(1) The configure script is generated by autoconf -- so download the "pristine" source tarball and look in the first few lines of the configure script. You should see something like:
"# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59 for cygutils 1.2.9."


Or, look in the configure.in/configure.ac script, It MIGHT say something like 'AC_PREREQ(2.59)'

(2) The Makefile.in files are generated by automake from Makefile.am. So, in the first few lines of the Makefile.in, you should see something like
"# Makefile.in generated by automake 1.9.5 from Makefile.am."


(3) also, the aclocal.m4 file is usually created by aclocal from acinclude.m4 and various other .m4 scripts. In the first few lines of aclocal.m4, you should see something like
"# generated automatically by aclocal 1.9.5 -*- Autoconf -*-"


Both (2) and (3) should tell you that the version of automake used by the people who created the source tarball was 1.9.5 -- so you want 'automake-1.9' to be the "active" version on your machine, if you're trying to re-run the upstream-approved versions of those tools for the package under discussion.

In sps's case, I bet the result of (2) or (3) would have said something about 'automake 1.4p6' and 'aclocal 1.4p6'...


Now, how to "make that happen" -- THAT's a question for this list. Either directly, or searching the archives.


You'd have found the following discussion about the packaging changes for cygwin's autotools, bringing them into line with the typical Linux-distribution structure:

"RFC: Changes to cygwin autotools packages"
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2005-05/msg00322.html

Searching the cygwin-announce list would find information about the new alternatives package:

"NEW: alternatives-1.3.20a-1"
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-announce/2005-06/msg00015.html

But you would NOT, unfortunately, find any mention of the actual release of the new autotool packages, because with all the new packages I released last month, I forgot to actually announce the new autotools. This is definitely my fault. I'll correct that later this evening.

--
Chuck




-- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]