Bug#130309: tetex-bin: libwww configure script won't regenerate from configure.in
On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 02:11:41PM +0100, Hilmar Preusse wrote:
> I'm sorry! We didn't do anything for this bug in the last years.
>
> Could you try if the bug is still existent in the TL version of
> Debian unstable (2009) or describe how we can test it ourself? I
> wouldn't like to forward a bug, which has been fixed already.
Hmmm... this bug has been swapped out my head for some time. He's what I
remember.
I was trying to cross compile teTeX[1]. The cross-compile nature of it
wasn't so relevant to this bug, other than it got in horrible knots. For
example it builds web2c then tries to run it. But it builds it with the
crosscompiler and so falls over when the resulting executable can't be run
on the build system.
[1] For RISC OS, arm-riscos-aof, with
http://www.riscos.info/index.php/GCCSDK which builds from the Debian
sources. That the cross-compile target isn't Debian isn't really the issue
- the same would happen when, say, building for Debian/arm on Debian/i386.
To fix this, I had to edit some autoconf scripts. (The exact issue was that
the target environment uses an extension on an executable filename, so
executable,ff8 like Windows uses executable.exe. This needed an extra
autoconf rule to support it). But I can across this problem when I reran
autoconf on the configure.in scripts in the teTeX tree (in libwww as an
example but others too) - they wouldn't regenerate (with whatever autoconf
was current - perhaps 2.13, I really can't remember). In other words, cd to
the appropriate directory and run 'autoconf'. (At this point we aren't
crosscompiling, just running everything native)
What I subsequently learned after posting the bug was that there was a
directory of m4 macros elsewhere in the tree that were necessary to pass to
autoconf before it could generate a ./configure from a configure.in. There
was no documentation about this, nor was there support in the build system
to regenerate the autoconf scripts (which can and do change, eg to add
support for new platforms).
So I think this can be tested by 'cd'ing to the libwww directory, run
'autoconf' and see if that works and the appropriate ./configure script will
run. If not, a simple one-line ./do-autoconf shell script invoking the
right version of autoconf with the extra m4 macros will probably suffice as
documentation.
I haven't been keeping up with TeXLive, but heard it better supported
crosscompiling. I have no idea whether this is true and if this sort of thing
has been fixed. My crosscompiler is distinctly rusty, so it might be a
while before I drag it out and try it again.
Hope this helps,
Theo
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