Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 12:15:15 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: Stefan Seefeld <seefeld@sympatico.ca> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: where is autoconf Message-ID: <20050303101515.GD1127@orion.daedalusnetworks.priv> In-Reply-To: <42268F70.7070208@sympatico.ca> References: <4226862E.30403@sympatico.ca> <20050303034141.GA89476@xor.obsecurity.org> <42268F70.7070208@sympatico.ca>
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On 2005-03-02 23:15, Stefan Seefeld <seefeld@sympatico.ca> wrote: >Kris Kennaway wrote: >>Someone whose attribution has been trimmed, wrote: >>> Well, I was looking for 'autoconf' in these files but didn't find it. >>> And indeed, even though I have 'autoconf-2.59_2' installed, all I have >>> is 'autoconf259', but not 'autoconf'. >> >> This is necessary because the autoconf developers don't understand why >> backwards compatibility is important for their tools (new versions >> like 2.59 cannot be used to build old applications that were written >> for e.g. 2.13, nor can multiple versions of autoconf be easily >> installed concurrently). > > I'm aware of these (very unfortunate) incompatibilities, though I had > expected the problem to be dealt with differently (for example by > setting a symbolic link to the currently active version). Unfortunately, this won't help. There is not a single executable, or a simple set of files that one can symlink and have autoconf magically just work(TM). >> You can use the gnu-autoconf and related ports, which installs into >> /usr/local/gnu-autotools so they do not poison the build environment >> of other ports. YOu might have to play games with PATH or other >> variables to get your application to find them. > > Ok, thanks for the explanation. I usually use a similar trick to synchronize the versions of autoconf, automake, libtool on Linux, Solaris and BSD. I manually install the tools with --prefix=/opt/gnu and prepend "/opt/gnu/bin:/opt/gnu/sbin" to my PATH whenever I need to use these.
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