Re: help a newbie?

[Bob Proulx]

Nick Rizzolo wrote:
> A quick search of Google and this mailing list's archives couldn't
> help me, so hopefully someone on this list can.  I'm new to autotools,
> and I'm trying to follow the tutorial at
> http://www-src.lip6.fr/homepages/Alexandre.Duret-Lutz/autotools.html
> which seems to be very up-to-date.  It includes a Hello World example
> that is also given in the automake manual at
> http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#Creating-amhello

I am sure that you have the following from those tutorials in your
configure.ac file:

  AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([-Wall -Werror foreign])

> configure.ac:2: option `-Wall' not recognized
> configure.ac:2: option `-Wall' not recognized
> autoreconf: automake failed with exit status: 1

This means that automake did not recognize the -Wall option and
failed.

> automake (GNU automake) 1.6.3

The current automake-1.10 will recognize that option okay.  Get the
latest version of automake and install it.

  http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/automake/

> autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.57

Repeat with the process to get the current autoconf-2.61.

  http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/autoconf/

But wait!  Autoconf heavily depends upon m4 and the new autoconf
requires at least m4-1.4.8.

  http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/m4/

And at after that you will probably need a current gettext-1.16.1 too.

So this is the complete list as I know it.  Update these and make sure
you have m4-1.4.8 available before building autoconf or the resulting
autoconf will not work right.  (Unfortunately it will still pass all
of the tests though.)

  gettext-1.16.1
  m4-1.4.8
  autoconf-2.61
  automake-1.10

The autoconf and automake programs are developer tools.  When you make
a distribution of your project everything will be self-contained.  A
downstream builder building your project will not need to have those
versions installed.  They will simply run ./configure and use the
bundled files.

Hope that helps.
Bob