-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to Chris Karakas on 1/2/2010 12:41 PM: > But actually, that's *exactly* what I started to do this day!
No, installing m4 1.4.13 does NOT require running autoconf. > > build m4.spec > + autoreconf --force --install > configure.ac:20: error: Autoconf version 2.60 or higher is required That's your problem. 'build' is too complicated, and tries to invoke too many tools. Do NOT use 'build' for bootstrapping your installation. Rather, you should take the tarball that you have: > So far so good. I tried both m4-1.4.13.tar.bz2 extract it, then run './configure', 'make', and 'make install'. You may want to pass --prefix=/path/to/alternate/location, and then add that alternate location to your PATH, if you want the installation to exist only long enough to bootstrap other modern tools then discard that installation. And m4 1.4.x is lightweight enough that you can even use the uninstalled src/m4 executable after 'make', without even running 'make install', for the purposes of building autoconf. > > That pretty much says it all. If you have autoconf-2.59-79, like me, you > lose. 2.59 is clearly less that 2.60. No. You only lose _if you need to regenerate configure_. 'build' wrongly assumes that you need to regenerate configure to build m4. But you don't. The configure included with m4 is already good enough to just use as is for installing an initial m4 that is then new enough for building autoconf. - -- Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well! Eric Blake e...@byu.net -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAks/rAkACgkQ84KuGfSFAYB3igCgtv9CumwRcv12zL+TzpM8RVyq 7ncAnjP0wafHDKurDyVB09CjTjC/xi4t =uEU1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----