autotools on freebsd

[Matthias Andree]

enrico.sirola at gmail.com wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm going to use automake/libtool/autoconf on freebsd. The project is
> a library using libtool. I installed the autotools from the ports and
> defined the following environment variables:
> 
> export AUTOCONF="/usr/local/bin/autoconf259"
> export AUTOHEADER="/usr/local/bin/autoheader259"
> export AUTOMAKE="/usr/local/bin/automake19"
> export ACLOCAL="/usr/local/bin/aclocal19"
> export AUTOPOINT="/usr/local/bin/autopoint"
> export LIBTOOLIZE="/usr/local/bin/libtoolize15"
> 
> then I run 
> 
> autoreconf259 --force --install

I'll tell you a trick (I fell into the same pit before): the
corresponding ports are named gnu-autoconf (and similar) and you need to
add /usr/local/gnu-autotools/bin (or something similar, I don't recall
the exact spelling off-hand, use pkginfo -L to figure) to your PATH
variable.

Then you can use the regular autoreconf and friends without suffix.
Those with the 259 or 19 suffix are for the ports system, those with
gnu- in the port name are for us programmers.

It would be nice if this could be documented more clearly, or perhaps
the auto* packages be renamed to ports-auto* and gnu-auto* to auto* to
remove this confusion. I concede this is a larger change and cannot
happen before 6.0.

HTH,
Matthias