Re: Building CVS HEAD libtool outside of source directory

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Eric Blake wrote:

> Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen <at> simple.dallas.tx.us> writes:
>
> > Earlier today, most tests were passing under FreeBSD and OS-X.  It was
> > determined that if I updated m4 to 1.4.10 the problem with the few
> > test failures would go away.
>
> Upgrade m4 from which version?  1.4.4 and earlier have known bugs that can
> interfere with autoconf.  Autoconf 2.62 will require 1.4.5 or better, but
> depending on what you were using pre-upgrade, I may need to beef up Autoconf to
> be more selective about which m4 it uses.

One system was previously using GNU m4 1.4.2.  It seems that the 
FreeBSD system may previously have been using the m4 that comes with 
FreeBSD (non-GNU).

Ralph and I did have a discussion about Autoconf's m4 section today 
since I noticed that autoconf was selecting 'm4' over 'gm4' even 
though 'gm4' was freshly-installed GNU m4 1.4.10 and 'm4' was some 
older version or even FreeBSD m4.  Given the sensitivity to m4 
versions, it seems like more checks need to applied against 
candidates, with a dire warning if the best candidate is too old.

For the purposes of this exercise, since I had already noticed the 
problem, I created a symbolic link from m4 to the gm4 I installed and 
verified that the correct 'm4' was being used prior to re-installing 
Autoconf and Automake.

I suspect that not many libtool developers use the VPATH build. 
Gary's commit script does not seem to support it.

The VPATH build is quite useful for libtool, particularly given that 
'make clean' and 'make distclean' do not work unless the testsuite has 
been successfully run.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/