Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Problems building from CVS on FreeBSD

[Eric Blossom]

On Mon, Jan 03, 2005 at 07:55:39AM -0500, Stuart Brorson wrote:
> I can diagnose your problem, but can't help fixing it.  :-(
> 
> Your problem is that your version of the autotools is very new, but
> the Makefile.am and configure.ac used by Gnu Radio is older.

This diagnosis is not correct.

It appears that these problems are related to systems which have had
inconsistent (or multiple versions) of the autotools installed.

As Tom Huppi pointed out a week or so ago, the problem appears to be
related to locating which is the "right" aclocal directory to use to
pull the right macro defs from.

The problem is exacerbated because the build and install order of the
autotools matters, particularly when there are multiple versions
installed.  My current hypothesis is that when libtool is installed,
it installs additional macros in the <prefix>/shared/aclocal-<version>
directory.  If later another version of automake is installed, but
libtool isn't reinstalled, there will be problems, because automake/autoconf
will be picking up old or incorrrect versions of the libtool macros.

> 
> Here are your options:
> 
> *  I don't know if Gnu Radio's CVS contains source which have
> already been run through the autotools.

We deliberately do not check in non-source files.  

The tarballs we generate do contain the autotools output and hence
are easier to build, at the expense of lagging the bleeding edge.

> *  Read the errors & fix them in Makefile.am & configure.ac.  Then
> submit patches to the Gnu Radio developers.  :-)

Feel free, but I'm quite confident that that is not where the problem lies.


Another option that I use successfully on my system is to 
build and install the autotools into a non-standard location, and then
add that bin directory ahead of everything else.  That way the
existing system installation is not disturbed, and you get a clean
install of the autotools.

FWIW, I use /home/bleeding for the new stuff.  When configuring
autoconf, automake and libtool, just pass them the
--prefix=/home/bleeding option and ensure that your path contains
/home/bleeding/bin at the beginning.


Daniel, I haven't been a BSD user for many years, but it strikes me as
odd that the aclocal that's being referred to in your make output is
down under X11R6...


Eric