On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 11:20:14AM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
> Apparently it doesn't run libtoolize, and there is some libtool stuff
> checked in to CVS.

That is because they keep changing the macros, or at least shifting them
between packages. It used to be automatically run when you defined the
AM_PROG_LIBTOOL macro in the configure.in file, which is what we do. But
now they have moved it to AC_PROG_LIBTOOL, but there is no backward
compatibility for anyone using the old name. Changing to the new name
ofcourse breaks it for anyone using the older autoconf tools.

Similar to the check for assembly, it used to me AC_CHECK_PROG(AS...),
now it is AM_PROG_AS, and at some point it will probably end up being
AC_PROG_AS. But each change breaks existing configure.in files.

> The INSTALL file is out of date; it refers to ancient versions of
> autotools:
> 
>   You need to have automake, autoconf, and libtool installed on your system in
>   order to set up the build environment. Known versions that work are automake
>   1.4, autoconf 2.13, and libtool 1.2f.
> 
> I think we have reached the point where it is reasonable to require
> autoconf 2.5x, automake 1.8ish, and libtool 1.4 or 1.5.  It is

Ehh, my debian-unstable machine, which I consider reasonably 'bleeding
edge', didn't even have automake 1.8 until I just grabbed the latest
package lists.

The ones included in the Debian-stable distribution are probably
reasonable representative for the average system. It has autoconf 2.53,
automake 1.5, libtool 1.4.2 and I really want the build to work from
distributed tarballs, although I don't care all that much for the
bootstrap step needed for CVS builds.

Interesting, I just tried automake-1.8 (after fixing the quoting in the
Coda acinclude.m4 file. and got a whole slew of warnings from pgk.m4,
gtk.m4, gsl.m4, glib.m4, and audiofile.m4. I guess there are many
applications that haven't 'fixed' the quoting issues. I didn't get any
warnings related to libtoolize (after changing AM_PROG_LIBTOOL to
AC_PROG_LIBTOOL).

I'm trying a build from the tarball on another machine now to see if any
of these changes broke anything. Ok, building from CVS definitely
doesn't work with those changes, but a 'dist-tarball' that contains a
pre-built aclocal/configure file does seem to work.

Jan