Re: Installing Autoconf 2.63 on MinGW

[Keith Marshall]

On Sunday 07 December 2008 20:35:05 Brian Dessent wrote:
> Jason Curl wrote:

Jason,

Your question has already been asked, and answered, several times 
recently, on the MinGW and MSYS mailing lists; you would do well to 
search their archives, e.g.:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.mingw.user/26315/focus=26324
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.mingw.user/27824/focus=27838
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.mingw.msys/4605

You might also consult the Wiki article here:
http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS

paying particular attention to the follow up comments regarding 
autoconf.

You are doing all kinds of everything wrong here:

> > I've just downloaded mingw-1.0.11,

Er, what's that?  Some kind of prehistoric release no one has heard 
of?  I suspect you actually mean MSYS-1.0.11.
                                 ^^^^

> > installed m4-1.4.12

From whence?  This is surely your first fatal error; you *must* use 
the m4-1.4.7-MSYS release, from the `MSYS Supplementary Tools:Current 
Release:msysDTK-1.0.1' package collection on the MinGW download page 
at SourceForge:
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2435&package_id=67879

(Admittedly, SF's latest dumbing-down of the download page style has 
made this very difficult to find; please complain to them, and not to 
the MinGW project, about that).

> > and ActivePerl 5.10.0. When I run configure it succeeds, but
> > building autoconf fails complaining about needing GNU m4 1.4 or
> > later. 
>
> Activestate?  That's most likely your problem.  AS Perl can't cope
> with POSIX path translation.

Again, as Brian points out, this is another likely contributor to your 
problem; you should use the MSYS build of perl, which is found in the 
`MSYS Supplementary Tools:Technology Preview:Tools for MSYS-1.0.11' 
package collection, via the above link.

> > I've made links to perl, removed the old version of m4 so there's
> > only
>
> Do you mean copies?  Because again, these tools don't know links.

Unless you mean NTFS hard links, MS-Windows in general has no concept 
of links, in the *nix `symbolic-link' sense; (even the so-called 
symbolic-link support, allegedly present in Vista, is a dysfunctional 
joke).  Sure, Cygwin subverts the MS-Windows `shortcut' feature, to 
emulate symbolic-links, but such "links" cannot be used outside of 
Cygwin itself.

> > autom4te_perllibdir='..'/lib AUTOM4TE_CFG='../lib/autom4te.cfg'
> > ../bin/autom4te -B '..'/lib -B '..'/lib         --language M4sh
> > --cache '' --melt ./autoconf.as -o autoconf.in
> > The system cannot find the path specified.
> > autom4te: need GNU m4 1.4 or later: /usr/local/bin/m4
>
> You asked ActiveState perl to run the autom4te perl script, which
> itself proceded to attempt to invoke /usr/local/bin/m4, because
> that is the m4 that configure found.  But AS Perl has no earthly
> how to translate /usr/local/... into anything meaningful, because
> it is a plain Win32 program.  You need MSYS perl that knows how to
> translate /usr/local/... its actual Win32 path before invoking it.
>
> You might also consider doing a VPATH style build.

Don't waste time considering this; JUST DO IT!  You are doomed to 
fail, otherwise.

Regards,
Keith.