Re: installation of automake, autoconf, m4 error

[Pavel Raiskup]

On Monday 29 of June 2015 14:40:40 Krishnan Rajiyah wrote:
> I have been trying to install automake, autoconf, and m4 on my
> NetBSD-4.0.1-x68k system. As I understand from your website, automake
> requires autoconf which requires m4 which requires perl.

Automake and autoconf projects require perl, not m4 AFAIK.

> I havent installed perl yet, because I am getting errors saying that it
> cant make built-in (still trying to find a way around this).
> 
> However, the problem I had with m4 make was not with perl, it said that
> automake-1.14 was missing from the system. This does not make sense since
> that would mean that there would be a cycle in the dependency tree.

Automake is not needed to build/install m4 from source tarball, neither
perl is.  If you made some changes in the files extracted from tarball
before './configure && make', then you might need to re-automake the
Makefile.in files however (and then you also need perl).

  $ which automake-1.14 perl 2>&1 | sed 's/ in .*//'
  /usr/bin/which: no automake-1.14
  /usr/bin/which: no perl
  $ tar -xf m4-1.4.17.tar.xz
  $ cd m4-1.4.17/
  $ ./configure && make
  ...
  $ echo $?
  0

You haven't posted the steps (neither logs), so its hard to guess what is
going on.

> I am trying to install the latest version of autoconf (2012 release),
> the latest version of m4 (2013 release), and the second latest verison
> of automake (2013 release).
> 
> Can you please tell me what I am doing wrong? Is your software even
> compatible with a NetBSD-4.0.1-x68k system?

I can't tell (maybe others can), but my guess (based on [1]) is that m4
should work for you.

[1] 
ftp://ftp.se.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/pkgsrc-current/devel/m4/README.html

Pavel