Re: Version mismatch error

[Dan Nicholson]

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 7:38 AM, Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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.

Oh, that's true.

> 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.

The last time I thought about this, I wanted to have autoreconf call
libtoolize with --check if available. I got stuck on the libtoolize
part of the patch because I didn't know the right way to add the
serial number checks. If you could add a --check in libtoolize that
just sanity checks the setup, then I'd be happy to send a patch for
autoreconf that attempts to use the machinery.

What do you think?

--
Dan