Cannot Build on CentOS 6.x or Amazon Linux

[Ron Cemer]

Trying to run the bootstrap.sh in order to build the git version of 
Thrift on Amazon Linux, which is basically CentOS 6.x, errors with the 
following message:

./bootstrap.sh
Configuring for:
PHP Api Version:         20090626
Zend Module Api No:      20090626
Zend Extension Api No:   220090626
configure.ac:20: error: Autoconf version 2.65 or higher is required
configure.ac:20: the top level
autom4te: /usr/bin/m4 failed with exit status: 63
autoscan: /usr/bin/autom4te failed with exit status: 63


Ok, here's the deal.  It is completely unacceptable to develop a utility 
which require a newer version of a build utilitity than that which is 
available on the most popular server OS in the world.

CentOS 6.x is the most popular server OS in the world.  CentOS ships 
with autoconf-2.63-5.1.7.

Therefore, this is a bug which must be fixed immediately.

Please notify me when this is done.  I have a big project waiting on 
this.  Because of this screw-up, I'm unable to build Thrift, which is 
required to build the Cassandra PDO driver for PHP.  This is holding up 
a very important Big Data project for my company.

I'd say that if you're not doing successful builds of Thrift on every 
major Linux distro (not to mention the most important one: CentOS), 
you're not doing a very good job of maintaining this package.  
Especially when you consider the fact that

Also, why are there no Thrift RPMs for CentOS and RHEL, or Debian 
packages for Debian and Ubuntu?  This project is important enough that 
the current stable version should be available for all Linux distros.  
You should put it into EPEL for RHEL/CentOS, and create your own PPA for 
Debian/Ubuntu.  It's too painful to try to get past your crappy build 
process in order to use this tool to build other important packages.