Everyone should get a kick out of this: I
had fixed this once before [1] but it was actually YOU, Marcus,
that broke it again! [2]
I wish that was true! First of all, we need to find a better way to
fix that then to build libtool on practically all platforms from
source.
You really don't need libtool > 2.4.6 to build thrift. Works
perfectly on my Fedora 22 with libtool 2.4.2 .
The problem is not the libtool version, by the way. autoconf/aclocal
just can't, for some reasons I really can't figure out, find the
"default" system-wide M4 files containing the PKG_CHECK_MODULES
macro under specific circumstances. It seems that installing libtool
into the same prefix one is going to use later on fixes the problem
(as the M4s end up in a location that aclocal ends up looking in).
Have a test: if you edit the bootstrap.sh of thrift, and modify the
aclocal -I ./aclocal
line to
aclocal -I $(env -i aclocal --print-ac-dir) -I ./aclocal
the M4 syntax error disappears, at least for me. Of course, thrift
wouldn't successfully build with those modifications, either, but
that's really a long rabbit hole to go into :) Hence my curiosity!
Alright, its all coming back to me now, I think you've got me straightened out again, Marcus. I was definitely wrong on the pkg-config/libtool versions before, thanks for taking my hasty accusations so well! This is the exact same sort of issue that I was running in to when running autoreconf for libosmo-dsp and I realized that having ANY version of pkg-config installed from source under the PYBOMBS_PREFIX would make these sort of errors go away, too. I'm on-board with leaving the pkg-config and libtool versions alone and fixing the real underlying problems.
So, the thrift recipe was switched to using git for the source fetch around this time [3] due to a possible thrift bug. Question: now that thrift 0.9.3 is available in tarball form, might we want to switch back to using the release tarball? The benefit of the tarball is that it already includes all of the required m4 macro files, and that makes ./configure run MUCH more smoothly. In fact, this branch [4], which just switches to the tarball release of thrift 0.9.3, builds cleanly for me on CentOS 7. Give it a shot!
-Eric