bug-autoconf
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: can't use m4-1.4.3 to build autoconf-2.59 in Mingw32


From: Stepan Kasal
Subject: Re: can't use m4-1.4.3 to build autoconf-2.59 in Mingw32
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2005 11:52:00 +0200
User-agent: Mutt/1.4.1i

Hello,

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 09:57:10AM +0800, haibin zhang wrote:
>   I can't use m4-1.4.3 to build autoconf-2.59 in
> mingw32 and also I can't use m4-1.4.3 to build other
> projects. but I can use m4-1.4.exe which provide by
> mingw32 to build all projects. I have report this bug
> to m4, but they  said that may be mingw don't support
> autoconf,automake good!

sure, I saw that answer and I agree.  I think that very few people
use autotools under mingw32, so this is not much debugged.

And I agree that the best workaround is to use autotools on a more commonly
used platform, like GNU/Linux (if you have access to it) or on Cygwin (which
can be comfortly installed on MS Windows 95 or NT, or any of their modern
successors).  You can run "make dist" there to create a tarball (tar.bz2 or
tar.gz), then copy that tarball to mingw and then run
        ./configure
        make
        make install
there.
This path is not so thorny: many users of mingw do install tarballs there,
but few use mingw to _create_ the tarballs there.

> but I think that maybe bugs is in autoconf-2.59?

It might be a bug or deficiency in Autoconf, sure.

Thank you for reporting this.

But it might be difficult to fix this problem: Autoconf developers don't use
mingw, and don't have time to install it and learn all it's specific features.

If you can create some patches, they might be accepted here.  But it might
be difficult to write them.  As the first step, you'd have to port CVS versions
of Autoconf, Automake and perhaps also libtool to mingw.

Or you can report this as a bug to the mingw developers.  They would be able
to debug the problems and to create patches, so that future versions of 
Autotools
would work on mingw.  But I'm afraid they might be to busy to get to it.
(Unless you are going to sponsor that work, of course.)

To conclude, I guess that among the possible solutions, it's most realistic to
choose the workaround to create tarball inside a different environment.
(If you have access to a unix-type machine, eg. any system based on the Linux
kernel, use it.  If not, install Cygwin and build the tarball inside that.)

Or perhaps you don't _need_ mingw, perhaps Cygwin might serve you as well?

Good luck,
        Stepan Kasal




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]