bug#71847: Self-inflicted problem, libtool and automake installed to different prefixes

[Dave Hart]

On Sun, 30 Jun 2024 at 20:31, Karl Berry <karl@freefriends.org> wrote:

Hi Dave,

    installed and installing the prerelease version to a prefix earlier on my
    $PATH, not realizing I also needed to install libtool to the same prefix

Well, I'm glad that it's apparently not a "real" problem, but I'm rather
baffled. When I test an automake pretest, I don't do anything to install
libtool in the same test prefix early in PATH, and I've never had the
problem.

Unless libtool is not installed anywhere in PATH in your scenario. Then
it makes sense :). --thanks, karl.

I just reproduced it on a third system and see the same issue.  It's an ancient 32-bit SPARC Solaris 10 system with a bunch of not-quite-so-old GNU tools under /usr/local/gnu):

hart@pogo> m4 --version | head -1
m4 (GNU M4) 1.4.16
hart@pogo> libtool --version | head -1
libtool (GNU libtool) 2.4.2
hart@pogo> autoconf --version | head -1
autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.71
hart@pogo> autoconf --version | head -1
autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.71
hart@pogo> /usr/local/gnu/bin/automake --version | head -1
automake (GNU automake) 1.16.5
hart@pogo> $HOME/usr/local/bin/automake --version | head -1
automake (GNU automake) 1.16.92
hart@pogo>

Repro steps

# wget https://davehart.net/ntp/test/ntp-4.2.8p18-vcs.tar.xz

# tar xf *p18-vcs*xz

# cd *vcs

# ./bootstrap

Works fine with 1.16.5 in /usr/local/gnu/bin, breaks with $HOME/usr/local/bin earlier on $PATH

It might be something about the libevent configure.ac or Makefille.am, the source tree has projects nested three deep:

configure.ac

sntp/configure.ac

sntp/libevent/configure.ac

If you are willing to spend some time, I'm guessing you could reproduce the failure.  Thanks for taking an interest.

Cheers,

Dave Hart