Re: Version mismatch error

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Dan,

* Dan Nicholson wrote on Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 02:43:04PM CET:
> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > Depending on your package setup, that means either passing --install to
> > libtoolize (when AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR has been set in configure.ac), or
> > running aclocal with flags set so that it finds the right Libtool macros
> > (either by some -I include-path, or setting the path in the dirlist file
> > of the aclocal installation), or possibly hand-copying macro files or
> > file contents to your aclocal.m4 file.  Details are documented in the
> > manual.

> It would nice if libtoolize when run without --install (e.g. when run
> by autoreconf without --install) would detect that ltmain.sh and
> libtool.m4 are out of sync and error. One of the most common autotools
> errors I see is that people run bare autoreconf and things break
> strangely (to them) some time later. What do you think?

If we can do a warning or error reliably, then I'm all for it.
I don't think it can be done in libtoolize though, because aclocal may
be called afterwards and fix things up.  autoreconf might call
libtoolize with some special --check argument or so, to tell it that
aclocal --install won't be called afterwards.  Putting the warning into
automake seems possible but an ugly hack.  We could put a check into
autoreconf, but then non-autoreconf users wouldn't get the extra safety.

It's not easy.  :-/

Cheers,
Ralf