Of possible interest to anyone who builds all the Xorg packages using jhbuild
with an Xorg-flavoured xorg/util/modular/xorg.modules
I have found in the past that, of the packages still using autotools
(autogen.sh , autoreconf, etc), which is still quite a lot, many do not
include an m4 directory. And, no matter what ACLOCAL-related environment
variables I export, autoreconf always fails, because aclocal expects to find
an m4 directory in the package root.
The following patch to aclocal version 1.18 (which is a perl program)
has solved the problem and saved me a lot of time in reducing need for manual
intervention for the jhbuild build.
To use it
. Apply the patch directly to aclocal
. Before running jhbuild, export ACLOCAL_PATH as e.g.
Export ACLOCAL_PATH="${top_of_Xorg_tree}/xorg-build/share/aclocal"
_________________________________________________________________
--- aclocal-1.18 2025-07-12 08:12:09.000000000 -0400
+++ aclocal-1.18.symlink_cwd_m4_if_missing 2026-07-31 09:05:00.180344615
-0400
@@ -368,6 +368,21 @@ sub scan_m4_dirs ($$@)
foreach my $m4dir (@dirlist)
{
+# fix the "missing m4" problem when building certain xorg xcomponents :
+# if $m4dir is m4 (i.e. m4 in current dir) and does not exist and
ACLOCAL_PATH is exported,
+# then create a symlink m4 -> first or only item in ACLOCAL_PATH
+ if ($m4dir eq "m4") {
+ my $aclocal_path = $ENV{"ACLOCAL_PATH"};
+ if (-e $m4dir) {
+ print( "aclocal : $m4dir exists\n");
+ } elsif ($aclocal_path) {
+ my ($first) = split /:/, $aclocal_path;
+ my $link_result = `ln -s $first m4`;
+ print( "aclocal : symlink $m4dir created to $first\n");
+ } else {
+ print("aclocal : $m4dir does not exist and ACLOCAL_PATH not
exported\n");
+ }
+ }
if (! opendir (DIR, $m4dir))
{
# TODO: maybe avoid complaining only if errno == ENONENT?
