Re: Making autoconf

On 11/20/2008 05:23, Keith Marshall wrote:
> On Wednesday 19 November 2008 12:29:42 JonY wrote:
>> please avoid top posting next time, thanks.
>
> Hear, hear!  Well, actually it isn't really a matter of avoiding it;
> please just don't do it!
>

Maybe the Etiquette section needs to be moved up, before the Mailing 
List section. Adding quote fix for OE users 
<http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/oe-quotefix/> should be useful too.

>> Where did you get 1.4.9 from? Did you compile it yourself?
>
> Seems likely, and this indeed would be the problem; a natively
> compiled m4 would emit CRLF delimited output, but autom4te *needs* to
> have just LF -- that means you *must* use the m4-1.4.7 compiled as an
> MSYS component.
>
> This has been discussed several times before.  I don't know if Ralf
> Wildenhues watches this list, but if so, he may be able to offer some
> more authoritative info on the issue; IIRC, there was some talk of
> making autom4te more tolerant of this issue.
>
>> m4 devs claim MinGW strtod() is broken, hence it won't function
>> properly.
>> <http://www.mail-archive.com/m4-discuss-mXXj517/[email protected]/msg00200.html>
>
> Well, that's a rather glib statement, lacking any detail of what the
> claimed issues may be...
>
>> I'm not sure if it had been fixed with the recent runtime update.
>
> ...but AFAIK, the latest runtime provides a fully standards compliant
> strtod().  In any case, I fairly certain the current problem isn't
> related to this; it is much more likely to be the m4 CRLF issue.
>

My bad for jumping to conclusions.

> BTW, there is a further problem lurking in the OP's procedure, yet to
> be discovered.  This...
>
>> GNUCash@ELSHADAI ~/src/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.63
>> $ ./configure --prefix=/mingw
>> checking for a BSD-compatible install... /bin/install -c
>> checking whether build environment is sane... yes
>> checking for a thread-safe mkdir -p... /bin/mkdir -p
>>
>> etecera
>
> ...indicates that he is following the instructions on the original
> wiki page, and performing an `in-source' build, in spite of the
> comment I added to that page, warning against it; in fact, it's poor
> advice in *any* case, but in the case of autoconf it falls foul of a
> Makefile conflict between the file `INSTALL', and the phoney
> `install' target, (fixed in the git repository, but not yet in any
> released version).  You can work around it, by using `csmake', (or
> `cpmake'), instead of `make', but it doesn't arise at all, if you
> adopt the much preferred option of building in a separate directory,
> outside of the source tree.
>

Install instructions for autotools, automake and libtool in MSYS wiki 
entry updated.

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