Re: Where does the Latest Version Work?

>I will argue that grumpiness like this is a completely sane reaction to
>Autotools problems. I was trying to build master on old Solaris with GNU
>tools (including the Autotool sh^Huite) that were not exactly new. I
>was drawn into a seriously deep Jules Verne -style rathole of circular
>dependencies; and gave up about when a new libtool was needed to build
>a new libtool. Because libtool and its brethren in the Auto* club were
>too new to work with the current libtool. And building libtool would not
>work without libtool.

While I am autotools neutral (I feel about Autotools the way Winston
Churchill felt about democracy), I want to point out something here.

Normally, end users (people who just build software) should not have
to run any of the Autotools suite.  The idea is that the distribution
will already have the generated scripts, so all you do is just run the
generated configure script.  The problem here is that since Heimdal
doesn't have a new release (see previous discussions) no one has built a
distribution in a while, and people who want to built from the git tree
(normally only developers) then have to run the Autotools suite.  (Some
people put the autotools-generated scripts under revision control, but
personally I think that's a bad idea).

But the situation has a relatively simple solution; you can run the
autotools on ANOTHER machine, and then build a distribution tarball
with "make dist"; that will make a distribution tarfile with everything
pre-generated so you don't need any of the Autotools suite.  (Heimdal,
it turns out, not only requires Autotools but a JSON perl module just to
generate the tar file).

Hm, it does seem like lib/hcrypto/Makefile.am references dllmain.c,
which was removed in 2013; maybe somebody should fix that?  I guess
no one has tried to run "make dist" since then.  But once you fix
that, "make dist" works fine.  If you ask nicely, I could even
email that to you (but I don't guarantee it would work, of course;
I see that people haven't been building distribution tar balls in
a long while.  Again, see previous discussions regarding lack of
Heimdal development resources).

>Also, the autotool maintainers would benefit a lot from actually
>publishing a high-level bootstrapping guide.

I do not know what your exact problem is, but I have installed all of
the Autotools from scratch and none of them need themselves to build.
Bootstrapping has never been a problem.

--Ken