Re: What might cause this failure?

[Eric Siegerman]

On Sun, Aug 18, 2002 at 07:55:53PM -0700, Bruce Korb wrote:
> No errors,
> except for this incomprehensible thing.
>   [lots of commands] \
>   && make  distcleancheck
> configure: error: cannot find install-sh or install.sh in config ../config
> make: *** [distcheck] Error 1

Not sure whether this is relevent or not, but it might offer a
clue.

I saw something kind of similar in a package I worked on.  The
package used AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS(), and it was from one of the
subdirectories that the distributions were built:
        pkg-root/
                Makefile.am
                configure.ac
                bar/
                baz/
                distrib/
                        Makefile.am
                        configure.ac
                        more-stuff
One went "cd pkg-root/distrib; make dist" to build a
distribution.  I can no longer recall why (maybe just because I
didn't understand things too well :-), but one had to run
automake separately in both pkg-root and pkg-root/distrib.

The problem was that, in distrib:
  - "automake --add-missing" didn't think install-sh was in fact
    missing, because it could find the copy in pkg-root, because:
      - its default search path is ($SRCDIR  $SRCDIR/..
        $SRCDIR/../..)
      - the file had already been installed in pkg-root by the
        "automake --add-missing" that had been run there
    
  - For the same reason, pathnames in distrib got configured to
    ../install-sh and the like, which masked the problem for the
    most part

  - But install-sh didn't make it into distributions, so trying
    to build from one of those would blow up

(There may have been similar problems with other files that
--add-missing is supposed to deal with.)

Workaround: add this to pkg-root/distrib/configure.ac:
        AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR([.])

That defeats the search path shown above, which keeps automake
from seeing ../install-sh etc., and thus forces it to put another
copy directly into distrib.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
|  |  /
Anyone who swims with the current will reach the big music steamship;
whoever swims against the current will perhaps reach the source.
        - Paul Schneider-Esleben