SRPMs and RHEL 5/6 and SLES 11

[Jeff Squyres]

Greetings.  

I am a developer on the Open MPI project (www.open-mpi.org), a long-time user 
of the GNU Autotools.  Our latest release is the 1.5 series; the configury that 
ships in the Open MPI v1.5 distribution tarball is bootstrapped with Autoconf 
2.65, Automake 1.11, and Libtool 2.2.6b.

We're running into a problem when trying to build RPMs on RHEL5, RHEL6, and 
SLES 11.  The issue is that these distros' /usr/lib/rpm/macros that defines 
%configure to include options such as --program-suffix, but since our configure 
script was bootstrapped with AC 2.65, it doesn't understand --program-suffix.  
Specifically: when you "rpmbuild --rebuild open-mpi-srpm", our configure script 
errors and aborts because it doesn't  -- the RPM does not build.

An obvious workaround is to hand-edit the /usr/lib/rpm/macros file to remove 
the errant options, but this is not a good / general solution.  I've tried to 
ask some assistance from Red Hat but I haven't been able to get a response.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to solve this issue?  I would find it 
hard to believe that we're the only package running into this issue.

Thanks!

-- 
Jeff Squyres
address@hidden
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