Re: gnome cvs on RH7.3

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Sun, Jun 09, 2002 at 03:03:16AM +0100, mike wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-06-09 at 00:40, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
[..]
> > If you can give more specifics about what is going wrong, I might be
> > able to help further.
[..]
> full error log follows
(I've chopped all but the relevant bits.)
[...]
> You should add the contents of `/usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4' to
> `aclocal.m4'.Running aclocal -I
> /usr/local/gnome/share/aclocal/gnome2-macros  ...
> aclocal: /usr/share/aclocal/ccstdc.m4: 23: duplicated macro
> `AM_PROG_CC_STDC'

This indicates that your autotools setup is picking up duplicate .m4
files during the build. Since it appears from later in these messages
that you are using automake 1.5, then you need to look at your install
of that. You have upgraded automake at some point, since Red Hat 7.3
comes with automake-1.4 as 'automake' (you can also have automake-1.5
installed from the release, but it's called just automake-1.5). This
(1.4) is also the recommended automake for building GNOME 2. Although it
should probably build with later versions, there are no guarantees
(people like James Henstridge sometimes make commits to keep the
compatibility up).

So the next bunch of error messages are all related. Maybe you've set
ACLOCAL_FLAGS, or whetever that environment variable is called
incorrectly, I don't know for sure. I haven't installed both -1.4 and
-1.5 on the same system to experiment (since unwinding problems like
that are pretty hairy).

> [root localhost nautilus]# rm -rf /usr/bin/automake
> [root localhost nautilus]# ln -s /usr/bin/automake-1. /usr/bin/automake
> automake-1.4  automake-1.5  

Yeargh! What are you doing here?? My earlier tip was based on the
assumption that you were using automake-1.4 and that you were probably
using something like vicious-build-scripts or jhbuild or whatever.

Nuking /usr/bin/automake seems a bit drastic, even though it is only a
symlink. And I don't think you'll be able to get away with pretending
that automake-1.5 is called automake-1.4 for long without things blowing
up.

The remaining errors are still automake errors.

> BTW - have never had anything like these problems with any previous
> version of RH - debian is looking more and more attractive

Well, not screwing with your system at random is probably an attractive
option, too. Please don't sink to the point of disparaging a
distribution because some modification you made didn't "just work".

If you want to build GNOME 2 from scratch and you can't resolve those
automake problems, then grab one of the sandboxing scripts that are
around which do the build for you (jhbuild, vicious-build-scripts, etc).
They all let you customise where to put things and will set things up so
that the right versions of stuff are being called (and not grabbing
other .m4 files, etc). From memory, jhbuild does use automake-1.6 or
something like that, so it's possible, but you need to be careful. Sorry
I can't be more helpful, but I'm not really sure of your specific setup,
although the problem of duplicate macros is not uncommon.

Cheers,
Malcolm

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