Hi Stefano! On 21 February 2012 22:35, Stefano Lattarini <stefano.lattar...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 02/11/2012 08:19 PM, Tim Retout wrote: >> Since automake 1.11.2, aclocal no longer succeeds if the system acdir >> does not exist. This causes Debian's 'make' package (and possibly >> others?) to FTBFS under cowbuilder, because it calls autoreconf when >> /usr/share/aclocal is not present. >> > But the automake build system creates /usr/share/aclocal at "make install" > time... So, how comes that this "cowbuilder" provides an aclocal program > without an /usr/share/aclocal directory?
Well, /usr/share/aclocal-1.11 exists. But /usr/share/aclocal does not, because there are no third-party m4 files required at the time that GNU Make was being compiled. Cowbuilder is a minimal chroot environment designed to ensure clean builds - it is very common for packages to be built in this type of environment, and it worked all the way up to and including automake 1.11.1. Should automake installations create an empty /usr/share/aclocal directory? That might be all that's needed to fix this. I notice that m4/Makefile.am has a relatively new comment about creating $(system_acdir)... the Debian packaging probably hasn't been updated to reflect this. So, I think I've answered my own question - we can fix this in the packaging. :) I don't *think* multiple automake versions on the same system owning /usr/share/aclocal will be a problem... Kind regards, -- Tim Retout <dioc...@debian.org>
