[Pan-users] Re: How to compile a snapshot ??

[Duncan]

Csv4Me2 posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below,  on
Wed, 08 Feb 2006 22:44:47 +0100:

> But my generic gnome autogen was looking for automake-1.4 and that's not
> on my system, anymore, but 1.8.5 is. So I patched that generic
> autogen,sh a bit. And lo and behold, ./autogen.sh in the Pan topdir ran,
> but with a lot of underquoted gettext errors. And it didn't compile,
> damn.
> 
> So, could anyone tell me what the the exact minimum package requirements
> are to get that CVS snapshot compiled. I guess my system needs an
> upgrade, probably.

I see you've gotten past this, but for further reference...

automake and autoconf are both, to use Gentoo's term, "slotted".  What
that means is that newer versions aren't necessarily compatible with older
versions, just as GNOME 2 isn't compatible with GNOME (1) and KDE 3.x
isn't compatible with 2.x (which wouldn't be compatible with 1.x, but
unlike GNOME/GTK, there are very few folks still running KDE 2, let alone
KDE 1).

Folks that do a lot of compiling from source therefore often have multiple
versions of both automake and autoconf on their systems.  Since Gentoo is
normally a compile-from-source distribution, that description of those who
do a lot of compiling from source certainly fits most Gentoo users, of
which I am one, and here's a list of the versions I have merged, that is,
installed on my system in parallel, for each of the above:

$equery list autoconf
[ Searching for package 'autoconf' in all categories among: ]
 * installed packages
[I--] [  ] sys-devel/autoconf-2.13 (2.1)
[I--] [  ] sys-devel/autoconf-2.59-r7 (2.5)
[I--] [  ] sys-devel/autoconf-wrapper-3.2 (0)

(That autoconf-wrapper is a script that is supposed to automatically
select which of the two autoconfs should be called and redirect the call
to the appropriate one.  The wrapper concept works decently well, but
there are occasional bugs.)

$equery list automake
[ Searching for package 'automake' in all categories among: ]
 * installed packages
[I--] [  ] sys-devel/automake-1.4_p6 (1.4)
[I--] [  ] sys-devel/automake-1.5 (1.5)
[I--] [  ] sys-devel/automake-1.6.3 (1.6)
[I--] [  ] sys-devel/automake-1.7.9-r1 (1.7)
[I--] [  ] sys-devel/automake-1.8.5-r3 (1.8)
[I--] [  ] sys-devel/automake-1.9.6-r1 (1.9)
[I--] [  ] sys-devel/automake-wrapper-1-r1 (0)

The number in parenthesis indicates the "slot", so as you can see, there's
one slot for automake-1.4, with various versions available in that slot,
and another for 1.8, which is somewhat incompatible with 1.4.  If you'd
had 1.4 installed, you'd probably have not needed the additional patching
to work around the incompatibilities between versions.  Again, there's a
wrapper script that serves to automate the selection of the correct
version as needed.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html