Re: ntpd autoreconf question (FreeBSD)...

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Michael, Harlan,

* Harlan Stenn wrote on Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 07:44:07PM CEST:
> 
> > Hi!  I write to you directly because I have a problem that, searching 
> > through Google, you posted to the autoconf mailing list with the same 
> > problem...but the solution itself was not posted.
> 
> OK, and I'm adding address@hidden to my response.

Thanks.  FWIW, this is probably an aclocal issue (aclocal is part of
Automake).

> > You had a problem in which you had to run autoreconf in order to do 
> > something with ntpd.  However, you were getting errors like this:
> > 
> > possibly undefined macro: AC_PROG_LIBTOOL
> > possibly undefined macro: AC_DISABLE_SHARED
> > 
> > How did you solve this problem?
> 
> Best I can remember I added a -I/path/to/libtool/automacros/ to the
> ACLOCAL flags on the machine that gives me this problem.
> 
> And it makes no sense to me why this should be needed - from my POV
> automake, autoconf, and libtool should know how to play nice together
> but libtool has problems in this regard way too often.

Well, really this happens every time you install packages that install
their own macro files, but you install in a different --prefix than
where Automake is installed.  What you can do to have aclocal find them
all the time is
  echo $libtool_prefix/share/aclocal >> $automake_prefix/share/aclocal/dirlist

but you cannot use this setup to support multiple Libtool installations
in parallel.

The same issue will happen with other packages that install their own
.m4 macro files, such as gettext, bison, etc.

> A long time ago the folks who wrote a modules.sf.org-friendly ports
> system (I think they were at kth.se) had a patch to (near as I can
> remember) add a new environment variable to aclocal so one could easily
> support multiple installed versions of libtool.  I tried to get that
> patch accepted into the mainstream auto* codebase but was unsuccessful.

I suppose, if you use autoreconf, you can use
  ACLOCAL="aclocal -I $libtool_prefix/share/aclocal"

Otherwise, Harlan could you point to the thread where the patch was
rejected?  Thanks.

Cheers,
Ralf