Re: Upgrading autoconf

[Bob Proulx]

Eric Fowler wrote:
> I have the tarball for autoconf.2.61.tar.gz .
> 
> Now what the @#! do I do with it?

Okay.  The first thing to do is to light up an aroma therapy candle
and then silently meditate to harness your inner Qi.  :-)

> I know I can unzip and untar it but in
> which directory does it "want" to reside?

It wants to reside in whatever working directory you want to use to
work with the source code.  This is not the installation location.  I
personally use ~/src/ (aka $HOME/src/) for my work area but this can
just as easily be done in /tmp if it is truly temporary.  (Many
systems are configured to purge /tmp on reboot so don't keep anything
you want to keep there.  After a reboot it would be gone, gone, gone.)

> I unzip'ed it into /tmp and ran ./configure && make && make install

Sounds good.  If you did that then stop.  You are done.  You have
already installed it with the 'make install' part.

> and got a tree built under tmp which is not where I want it.

The tree in /tmp/autoconf-2.61 is the source code used to build and
install but is not the installation image.  You can remove it after
you have installed it.  I tend to keep the program around so that I
can use it to 'make uninstall' to remove it after I no longer need it
or before upgrading to the next version which may install differently
named files.  Removing the old version cleans up the lint from the
system.

> Where to put it and how exactly to unzip?

You already did it.  But the instructions are in the INSTALL file
included in the distribution after you unpack the tar archive.

    Briefly, the shell commands `./configure; make; make install'
    should configure, build, and install this package.

The default installation location is /usr/local.  If you did exactly
what was said there then you have installed autoconf into /usr/local
and the program will be located in /usr/local/bin/autoconf along with
others in the package.

Since /usr/local/bin is normally in PATH ahead of /usr/bin any files
placed there will be run instead of the system installed version.
Installing into /usr/local overrides /usr/bin.  Here is a typical user
PATH.

  PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/games

One useful command would be to run 'make check' to have autoconf run
all of the tests in the test suite.  This may take quite a while but
would be a good thing to do to verify that it is running correctly.
This tests the working copy (in /tmp or wherever) and not the
installed copy because it is usually run as a check and then when that
is verified good the package is installed.

Bob