Re: Problems compiling TN5250 from CVS on RedHat 8.0

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Dave McKenzie wrote:
>
> I had a problem with autogen.sh when compiling TN5250 on RedHat 8.0.
> (This was 0.17.1 downloaded from CVS.)  It had worked OK on RedHat 7.3.
>
> The problem was it didn't copy ltmain.sh to the TN5250 directory, which
> caused later fatal errors.  automake versions prior to 1.6 run
> libtoolize internally to get ltmain.sh.  But in 1.6 they took libtoolize
> out of automake and put it in autoreconf, part of autoconf.  (RedHat 7.3
> has automake 1.4, while 8.0 has 1.6.)
>
> The fix was to put libtoolize into autogen.sh just before the call to
> automake.  Works OK now.

I had the same problem with RedHat 8.0, but hadn't had a chance to chase
down the problem yet.  Thanks for posting this!

I've had other problems as well...  In fact, I've had no end to problems
and frustrations with automake/autoconf.   Sometimes I think it'd be
easier to not use them at all.

On FreeBSD, if I don't use autoconf version 2.13, then the configure
script doesn't work.   It crashes like this:

   loading cache /dev/null within ltconfig
   ltconfig: you must specify a host type if you use `--no-verify'
   Try `ltconfig --help' for more information.
   configure: error: libtool configure failed

(Whereas with 2.13, it works flawlessly.)

On any system using a newer version of autoconf, I get these warning
messages:

configure.in:11: warning: do not use m4_patsubst: use patsubst or m4_bpatsubst
configure.in:201: warning: AC_CANONICAL_HOST invoked multiple times
configure.in:223: warning: do not use m4_regexp: use regexp or m4_bregexp
WARNING: Using auxiliary files such as `acconfig.h', `config.h.bot'
WARNING: and `config.h.top', to define templates for `config.h.in'
WARNING: is deprecated and discouraged.

WARNING: Using the third argument of `AC_DEFINE' and
WARNING: `AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED' allows to define a template without
WARNING: `acconfig.h':

WARNING:   AC_DEFINE([NEED_MAIN], 1,
WARNING:             [Define if a function `main' is needed.])

WARNING: More sophisticated templates can also be produced, see the
WARNING: documentation.

All of this really needs to be fixed...    I wish I knew more about
automake & autoconf.  Sigh