aclocal: macro `AM_PROG_MKDIR_P' required but not defined

[Michael Abbott]

Hi,

(I'm completely new to automake so please bear with me ;).

I'm currently having a shot at building libguile via MinGW / msys.  Their
source distribution is composed of .tar.bz2, a patch and a shell script to
apply the patch and reconfigure / build.

When "autoreconf -f -v -i" gets called, I get:
    aclocal: macro `AM_PROG_MKDIR_P' required but not defined

On reading the manual, it seems that autoupdate is used to correct this, so
I ran that and got this:
    aclocal.m4:17: error: this file was generated for autoconf 2.61.
    You have another version of autoconf.  If you want to use that,
    you should regenerate the build system entirely.

So a bit of a google search seemed to indicate autoreconf is the means to
rebuild the build system.  Which puts me in an infinite loop ;) !

As a desperate measure I recursively removed all aclocal.m4 files that use
AM_PROG_MKDIR_P, and autoupdate ran without hitch.  But when autoreconf
runs, I get the same AM_PROG_MKDIR_P problem as before.

For brevity:
    $ grep -r AM_PROG_MKDIR_P *
    aclocal.m4:  AC_REQUIRE([AM_PROG_MKDIR_P])dnl defined by automake
    aclocal.m4:AC_REQUIRE([AM_PROG_MKDIR_P])dnl
    aclocal.m4:# AM_PROG_MKDIR_P
    aclocal.m4:AC_DEFUN([AM_PROG_MKDIR_P],
    guile-readline/aclocal.m4:AC_REQUIRE([AM_PROG_MKDIR_P])dnl
    guile-readline/aclocal.m4:# AM_PROG_MKDIR_P
    guile-readline/aclocal.m4:AC_DEFUN([AM_PROG_MKDIR_P],

And "automake --version" says 1.7.1 (which appears to be quite old?).

What's the best way of going about fixing this?

Thanks,
- Mab