Re: [bug-gawk] aclocal-1.15 direct dependency/requirement

[Andrew J. Schorr]

Hi David,

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 03:47:11PM +0200, David Kaspar [Dee'Kej] wrote:
> during backporting of the recent patches into gawk-4.2.1 in Fedora, I have
> found out a small problem. Your build system (after backporting the
> patches, and adding 'automake' and 'bison' into buildroot) now directly
> requires the 'aclocal-1.15' binary.

FYI, I don't have any problem building with an older version of aclocal;
on a CentOS 7.5 system:

bash-4.2$ aclocal --version
aclocal (GNU automake) 1.13.4
Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv2+: GNU GPL version 2 or later 
<http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by Tom Tromey <address@hidden>
       and Alexandre Duret-Lutz <address@hidden>.
bash-4.2$ uname -a
Linux ti129 3.10.0-862.3.2.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon May 21 23:36:36 UTC 2018 
x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
bash-4.2$ tar xf ~/Downloads/gawk-4.2.1.tar.lz
bash-4.2$ cd gawk-4.2.1
bash-4.2$ ./configure && make && make check && echo YES
...
YES

> This actually causes a problem with build in Fedora, because e.g. in Fedora
> Rawhide (F29) we are already using 'aclocal-1.16', and thus the build
> itself fails.
> 
> ----------------------
> + /usr/bin/make -O -j4
> CDPATH="${ZSH_VERSION+.}:" && cd . && /bin/sh
> /builddir/build/BUILD/gawk-4.2.1/missing aclocal-1.15 -I m4
> /builddir/build/BUILD/gawk-4.2.1/missing: line 81: aclocal-1.15: command
> not found
> WARNING: 'aclocal-1.15' is missing on your system.
>          You should only need it if you modified 'acinclude.m4' or
>          'configure.ac' or m4 files included by 'configure.ac'.
>          The 'aclocal' program is part of the GNU Automake package:
>          <http://www.gnu.org/software/automake>
>          It also requires GNU Autoconf, GNU m4 and Perl in order to run:
>          <http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf>
>          <http://www.gnu.org/software/m4/>
>          <http://www.perl.org/>
> make: *** [Makefile:585: aclocal.m4] Error 127
> ----------------------

I think the real question is why aclocal is being run in the first place. The
tarball includes a functioning configure script and Makefiles, so it shouldn't
be necessary to run the autotools again.  Are you touching configure.ac?
The bootstrap.sh script could possibly be useful for freshening the timestamps
to avoid re-running autotools, but that's not typically necessary when building
from a tarball.

Regards,
Andy