newbie automake/autoconf grief

[John Sutton]

Hi there

I've downloaded, built and installed grub-0.91 no problem.  Wonderful piece of
work!  Bye bye lilo... except that I'm trying to put a boot loader onto an mtd
device.  I've succeeded in doing this with lilo but not yet with grub ;-(

Problem is, I need to patch the grub source, which I've done, but then I need to
run automake and autoconf and this is where the trouble lies.  To try to sort
this out I've discarded the mtd patch and am working with the vanilla 0.91
source, but I cannot get aclocal/autoheader/automake/autoconf/autoreconf (in
all possible permuted orders ;-) to work.

I've tried automake versions 1.4, 1.4-p5 and 1.6.1 and autoconf 2.13 and 2.53,
again in all possible combinations, and still no luck.

You can guess how long I've been hacking away at this ;-(

So, my questions are:

To work with the 0.91 source, which versions of automake and autoconf are
required?

In which order should I run the tools:

  aclocal && autoheader && automake && autoconf ?

TIA

PS: Here, FWIW and in no particular order, are some snippets of the kind of
grief I've been getting:

# automake
stage1/Makefile.am:2: invalid variable `nodist_pkgdata_DATA'
stage2/Makefile.am: nbloader_exec_OBJECTS should not be defined
stage2/Makefile.am: variable `LDADD' not defined

# automake --gnu --add-missing
automake: docs/Makefile.am: Assembler source seen but `CCAS' not defined in 
`configure.in'
automake: docs/Makefile.am: Assembler source seen but `CCASFLAGS' not defined 
in `configure.in'

# autoheader
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':

# make
asm.o: In function `main':
asm.o(.text+0x0): multiple definition of `start'
start.o(.text+0x0): first defined here
asm.o: In function `main':
asm.o(.text+0x0): multiple definition of `_start'
start.o(.text+0x0): first defined here
e2fs_stage1_5_exec-stage1_5.o: In function `cmain':
/usr/src/grub/stage2/stage1_5.c:59: undefined reference to `chain_stage2'

***************************************************
John Sutton
SCL Internet
URL http://www.scl.co.uk/
Tel. +44 (0) 1239 711 888
***************************************************