Dear Alexei, Werner and Hin-Tak, Thank you for the comments; I appreciate the prompt replies :-).
There is this peculiar autogen.sh to be run initially... Still fails? How?
I had indeed read the README, but it had only instructed using 'autogen.sh' when "... building a git snapshot or checkout, *not* if you grabbed the sources of an official release."
Since I had got the tarball as an official release (not from a Git snapshot), I followed the instructions and ignored this step.
Please describe your setup carefully before jumping to quick solutions.
The problem occurred on an Arch GNU/Linux, and the '/bin/sh --version' is GNU Bash 5.2.26 and I installed FreeType 2.11.0. After checking the Git repository and noticing that my particular problem occurred there also, I linked the Git repository instead of the details of the tarball I downloaded. But you are right, I should have given more details on the circumstances; sorry about that.
... nor have you shown any output of the failure. And what do you mean with a 'faulty shell', mentioned in a previous e-mail?
The libraries in '/usr/lib' have conflicts with some of my other software, so I have replaced that with my custom environment in 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH'. However, '/bin/sh' needs to link with the readline library in '/usr/lib' to run. As a result, any time '/bin/sh' is run, it will fail with a linking error.
Because of this, I need to set the 'SHELL' environment variable so the programs do not build with '/bin/sh', but use my custom shell (that I have also built from source in my custom directory: I do not have root permissions on this computer).
To avoid hard-coded statements like '#!/bin/sh', before './configure'-ing the source codes, I first run a 'sed' and replace it with my custom shell. This process has worked on +100 of software packages that I am building from source for my project (which uses https://maneage.org). Only a handful of packages needed some special tweaking/hacks like this one with GNUMAKE in FreeType.
I am very sorry again for not being too clear in my first comment and thanks again for the prompt replies :-).
Cheers, Mohammad
