On Wed, 14 Apr 2021, Laurence Marks wrote:
I have some software which has been "fine" for about 15 years, with one
exception: every 6-12 months or so when I (or students/others) compile it
we run into version problems. The typical ones are version mismatch between
libtool and/or aclocal (called from libtool). While I can futze around with
libtoolize/aclocal/autoconf/automake etc until it works, this is not viable
for users who barely understand linux.
Is there some way in configure.ac (Makefile.am) to setup so the relevant
version fixes can be done automatically? There are so many posts about
version mismatches that this should be there. Maybe it is and I just missed
it.
Most problems seem to stem from packages providing the generated files
from Autoconf, Automake, and libtool so that end users don't need to
have the tools available. This would be combined with file time-stamp
issues. Many source control systems do not preserve file time-stamps.
If the operating system distribution (or some other source) provides
versions which differ from what the package provided, then there will
be a problem.
One thing that can help quite a lot is to include AM_MAINTAINER_MODE
in configure.ac so that the user needs to add the
--enable-maintainer-mode option in order to enable self-maintenance
rules. If the user does not provide the option, then the existing
files will be used, which is usually just fine unless a file has
actually been modified.
It is sometimes said that 'autoreconf --force' will solve all
problems, but in my experience this is not always true.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
Public Key, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt
