OSX autotools: `aclocal.m4' not being output by `autom4te' - macos

I have been trying to build the freetype2 library in OSX Mavericks for several weeks now, but without success.
The trouble is with using GNU Autotools to create the configure build script.
I have installed automake, autoconf, libtoolize, m4 and perl5 using the macports port command.
When executing aclocal, there is supposed to be a file created in the configure directory that contains Autotools macros: aclocal.m4. However, this file is not being output, and the subsequent glibtoolize and autoconf commands are generating a spurious configure script.
The result is: no aclocal.m4 file, and the usual contents of ./autom4te.cache/traces.* being dumped at the top of the generated configure file (the traces.* files are empty).
e.g.:
m4trace:configure.ac:14: -1- AC_SUBST([SHELL])
m4trace:configure.ac:14: -1- AC_SUBST_TRACE([SHELL])
m4trace:configure.ac:14: -1- m4_pattern_allow([^SHELL$])
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

GNU Autotools does not support execution over a working directory stored on a FAT32 file system. It results in spurious m4trace debug messages being output to the generated configure script.
It is unknown why this is, but may be related to the reliance on the sleep command to check whether a file has changed. FAT32 rounds time stamps to the nearest second, where execution and subsequent modification checks may happen on a sub-second timescale.
This has been raised with the development team, but for now, I move my working directory to my OSX boot partition before executing GNU Autotools.

Related

Can you modify ACLOCAL_PATH from configure.ac?

A user of xnec2c was trying to build on OSX and had autoconf issues because PKG_CHECK_MODULES could not be found since MacPorts puts it in a funny spot.
The user made autoconf work like so:
ACLOCAL_PATH=/opt/local/share/aclocal ./autogen.sh
ACLOCAL_PATH=/opt/local/share/aclocal ./configure
I would like to make it build on OSX without special user path hacks for ACLOCAL_PATH. Can that be done?
I started writing a possible fix below and realized it could an xyproblem so posed the question just above. However, if this starts any gears turning, then I would be open to a bit of special-casing for OSX:
For example, would it be possible (if not advisable) to detect:
Is PKG_CHECK_MODULES missing?
If so:
is it OSX?
Is [ -d /opt/local/share/aclocal ] true?
Does the macro exist there?
While aclocal has a few ways of appending to its search path (see https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Macro-Search-Path.html), you cannot modify that macro search path using code in configure.ac:
When the shell code in configure is run, it is too late, as the available macros have already been expanded. When autoconf (is it autoconf or something else? anyway, m4 called from autoreconf) generates configure from configure.ac by having m4 expand the macros it is also too late: aclocal has already collected the m4 macros it could find.
So what you would need is a step before the autoreconf run - which is beyond what I would consider a buildsystem needs to do.
What you can do: Put static strings into the top level Makefile.am file like e.g.
ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I auto-m4 -I project-m4 -I /opt/local/share/aclocal
(this example uses auto-m4/ with AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([auto-m4]) for the *.m4 files automatically put there by autoreconf/autopoint/libtoolize and project-m4/ for the project specific *.m4 files).
Of course, you should already have
m4_pattern_forbid([PKG_CHECK_MODULES])dnl
before invoking PKG_CHECK_MODULES for the first time so that the problem of the missing *.m4 file will be detected at the earliest possible time, i.e. when autoconf is about to generate a configure file with PKG_CHECK_MODULES unexpanded.
You could use some m4 code to print a lengthy error message if PKG_CHECK_MODULES is not defined. Something along the lines of (untested)
m4_ifndef([PKG_CHECK_MODULES], [dnl
m4_fatal([Could not find the PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro. Check that the pkg.m4 file is available and aclocal finds it (e.g. set ACLOCAL_PATH=/opt/local/share/aclocal).
])dnl
PKG_CHECK_MODULES([FOO], [foo])
Personally, I would go with m4_pattern_forbid and make sure OSX builds with homebrew work OOTB, and then document idiosyncrasies for building on rare and buggy systems like OSX with macports or SunOS without GNU tools in the INSTALL file.
Isn't it a bug in macports/OSX that aclocal there cannot find its *.m4 files? Shouldn't there be a dirlist file pointing to /opt/local/share/aclocal? Or perhaps they macports users should have an aclocal in their PATH which actually finds the macports macro files?
In any case, I would not consider it my build systems's job to fix a buggy system. You need to draw the line somewhere.

make install can't find aclocal

I'm trying to compile a code to run in parallel on a supercomputer. I know that others have compiled this code to run on the same computer, but for some reason I am having trouble even when using the same methodology as them. For now I'm just trying to compile the code to run in serial as that should be easier to troubleshoot.
configure seems to work correctly.
However make install returns the following:
> make install
CDPATH="${ZSH_VERSION+.}:" && cd .. && /bin/sh /home1/username123/code123/config/missing aclocal-1.13 -I ./config -I /home1/username123/code123/build-tools/aclocal -I /usr/local/share/aclocal
aclocal-1.13: error: couldn't open directory '/usr/local/share/aclocal': No such file or directory
Makefile:534: recipe for target '../aclocal.m4' failed
make: *** [../aclocal.m4] Error 1
aclocal is indeed not located at /usr/local/share/aclocal, it is located at /usr/bin/aclocal - but as /usr/bin is in my path, I don't understand why the location is an issue.
As has been made clear in comments on the question, the problem was that the project sources were copied onto the target system in a way that failed to preserve their original timestamps. The Autotools, through make, use file timestamps to determine which files are out of date, and in particular, Autools-generated Makefiles contain rules for rebuilding the build system itself that can be triggered this way.
It is not ordinarily necessary or desirable to rebuild an Autotools project's build system, except in conjunction with actually performing maintenance on it. It is often the case, in fact, that the necessary support for that is not available locally. To avoid the build system thinking that it needs to rebuild itself, it is important to preserve the file timestamps from the distribution archive. For some packages, it also works to pass the --disable-maintainer-mode argument to the configure script, but by no means do all Autotools configure scripts support that.
The archive extraction tools for the typical archive formats in which Autotools-based packages are distributed do, by default, preserve timestamps when unpacking, so the ordinary procedure of
unpack the archive on the target system (e.g. tar xzf foo-1.2.3.tar.gz)
change to the unpacked source directory (e.g. cd foo-1.2.3)
configure; make; make install
normally does the right thing. Substituting something else for (1), however, such as copying the unpacked source tree from somewhere else, may cause the package to think it needs to rebuild the build system. If that works correctly then it's no big deal, but it is not uncommon that it doesn't. That's what happened here, and following the standard procedure described above solved the problem.

Is there a way to reliably get automake to ignore timestamps?

First, a little bit of background as to why I'm asking this question: Our product's daily build script (as run under Debian Linux by Jenkins), does roughly this:
Creates and enters a build environment using debootstrap and chroot
Checks out our codebase (including some 3rd party libraries) from SVN
Runs configure and make as necessary to build all of the code
Packages up the results into an install file that can be uploaded to our headless server boxes using our install tool.
This mostly works fine, but every so often (maybe one daily build out of 10), the part of the script that builds one of our third-party libraries will error out with an error like this one:
CDPATH="${ZSH_VERSION+.}:" && cd . && /bin/bash
/root/software/3rdparty/libogg/missing autoconf
/root/software/3rdparty/libogg/missing: line 81: autoconf: command not found
WARNING: 'autoconf' is missing on your system.
You should only need it if you modified 'configure.ac',
or m4 files included by it.
The 'autoconf' program is part of the GNU Autoconf package:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/>
It also requires GNU m4 and Perl in order to run:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/m4/>
<http://www.perl.org/>
make: *** [configure] Error 127
As far as I can tell, this happens occasionally because the timestamps of the files in the third-party library are different (e.g. off by a second or two from each other just due to the timing of when they were checked out from the SVN server during that particular build). That causes the configure script to think that it needs to auto-regenerate a file, so then it tries to call 'automake' to do so, and errors out because automake is not installed.
Of course the obvious thing to do here would be to install automake in the build environment, but the build environment is not one that I can easily modify (due to institutional reasons), so I'd like to avoid having to do that if possible. What I'd like to do instead is figure out how to get the configure scripts (which I can modify) to ignore the timestamps and just always do the basic build that they do when the timestamps are equal.
I tried to finesse the problem by manually running 'touch' on some files to force their timestamps to be the same, and that seemed to make the problem occur less often, but it still happens:
./configure --prefix="$PREFIX" --disable-shared --enable-static && \
touch config* aclocal* Makefile* && \
make clean && make install ) || Failure "libogg"
Can anyone familiar with how automake works supply some advice on how I might make the "configure" calls in our daily build work more reliably, without modifying the build environment?
You could try forcing SVN to use commit times on checkout on your Jenkins server. These commit times can also be set in SVN if they don't work out for some reason. You could use touch -d or touch -r instead of just touch to avoid race conditions there.

configure command not found cygwin

This question has been asked many time but I am not able to resolve the problem from them so I am asking
I had installed Cygwin a few days ago.I tried using ./configure command but it says
-bash: ./configure: No such file or directory
I tried using
where configure
but I got the output
INFO: Could not find files for the given pattern(s).
then I tried grep configureand I got this output
/etc/bash_completion.d/configure
/usr/i686-pc-cygwin/sys-root/usr/share/libtool/libltdl/configure
/usr/share/ELFIO/configure
/usr/share/libtool/libltdl/configure
I tried to export the path and then run the ./configure but it also didn't worked.
I find no executable file named as configure in my cygwin bin directory.
Does it mean that I have to add configure file manually?How can I correct it?
NOTE :- I had also tried sh configure but it also didn't worked
If a software project is set up to be built using autoconf, that tool generates a script canonically called configure. It queries the system for various parameters that are subsequently used in the build, and is specific to the software package to be built. Different software projects have different configure scripts. They are all called configure, but their contents are not the same.
So, to actually build such a software project once that script was set up (usually done by the maintainers when packaging the source tarball for distribution), you call:
tar xzf <tarball>.gz # or xjf <tarball>.bz2 or whatever
cd <sourcedir> # the one you just untarred
./configure
make
make install
Note the prefix ./, which means "located in this directory" (i.e. the top directory of that project's source tree).
Actually, the better procedure is the so-called "out-of-tree build", when you set up a different directory for the binaries to be built in, so the source tree remains unmodified:
tar xzf <tarball>.gz # or xjf <tarball>.bz2 or whatever
mkdir builddir
cd builddir
../<sourcedir>/configure
make
make install
So, there is supposed to be no configure executable in your PATH, you are supposed to call the script of that name from the source tree you are trying to build from.
If I correctly understood...
Configure is not an application that should be installed on your system, but script that should be delivered with source code to prepare for make command. File named configure should be in the main directory of source code.
I understand that this is an old question. However many might find this solution helpful.
Normally we use the make command to compile a downloaded source in cygwin. In many cases it contains a autogen.sh file. Running that file with
bash autogen.sh
will in many case solve the problem. At least it solved my issue and i could then use the make command

Errors when installing a Perl module using make - Mac OSX 10.7

The problem:
I can't seem to install perl modules correctly, JSON-2.53 in particular.
I have done the following:
Searched for a similar problem and tried its solution - did not work.
perl ".../config.h, needed by `Makefile'" not working after OSX Lion upgrade
Installed XCode command line developer utilities (c compiler, make, etc)
Read version compatibility documentation on this particular perl module: http://metacpan.org/pod/JSON
Ran the following commands to make and install the desired perl module:
$perl Makefile.PL
Welcome to JSON (v.2.53)
If you install JSON::XS v.2.27, it makes JSON faster.
************************** CAUTION **************************
This is 'JSON version 2' and there are many differences *
to version 1.xx *
Please check your applications useing old version. *
See to 'INCOMPATIBLE CHANGES TO OLD VERSION' and 'TIPS' *
Writing Makefile for JSON
(verified that the Makefile has been written)
$make
make: *** No rule to make target `/System/Library/Perl/5.12/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/config.h', needed by `Makefile'. Stop.
What does that error even mean? What can I do to successfully make install this module?
Here are some additional items that may help you assist me in debugging this issue:
$which make
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/make
$which perl
/usr/bin/perl
$perl -v
This is perl 5, version 12, subversion 3 (v5.12.3) built for darwin-thread-multi-2level
I think you need to download and reinstall XCode. If I recall correctly for 10.7, after downloading Xcode from the app store it drops an installer into your Applications folder. You need to run it and try installing the command line tools again (from Xcode's prefernces pane). I know you mentioned you did this already, but a bit more background might explain why it's worth another try.
Here are the relevant lines in the Makefile from my Mac:
PERL_INC = /System/Library/Perl/5.12/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE
# Where is the Config information that we are using/depend on
CONFIGDEP = $(PERL_ARCHLIB)$(DFSEP)Config.pm $(PERL_INC)$(DFSEP)config.h
Later on in the Makefile CONFIGDEP is used as a dependency in a target. I believe in your case make is looking for /System/Library/Perl/5.12/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/config.h and can't find it. The error you're seeing is make's obtuse way of saying file not found.
config.h contains specific information about the OS but is not needed for running scripts. It's only referenced when you want to compile a module. With stock OSX you get enough perl to execute scripts. Install XCode and you get the bits (like config.h) to do perl "development". I use quotes because you can write and run perl scripts without Xcode. But as you discovered, compiling a module requires the additional files Xcode provides. (Incidentally, RedHat does the same thing. You have to install the perl-devel package to get config.h. The perl runtime is in a separate package.)
Here are some things you can try:
Verify /System/Library/Perl/5.12/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/config.h exists. If not, Xcode command line utilities were not installed properly. Try it again.
If config.h exists, check its content and make sure it looks sane. It's a C header file and consists of comments and #define statements.
If you don't have access to view config.h, you have a permission issue. Try using sudo make as a bypass. Disk Utility (found in Applications -> Utilities) might be able to permanently fix this.
You could risk changing the Makefile by removing "$(PERL_INC)$(DFSEP)config.h" from CONFIGDEP. I did this on my 10.8 Mac and it worked without issue (it passed all tests as well). However, if you don't find the root cause of your config.h issue, the next time you want to install a perl module you may find yourself right back where you started.
I had this exact same error, whilst this may not be a solution for you.... after reinstalling an updated xcode compatible with the OSX version (+rebooting after the install) I still had the error - to cut a long story short I noticed there was no config.h in /CORE/ after the error.....the solution that worked was to touch config.h and create the file first and then re-run the make. Hope this helps someone.

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