FreeBSD Port: automake19-1.9.5

[Ade Lovett]

On May 19, 2005, at 09:12 , Kris Kennaway wrote:
> If it would cause enough net simplification, maybe.  It's a lot of
> work to convert ports over though, so someone needs to want it enough
> to do that work :-)

Actually, it doesn't.  One non-trivial problem associated with  
autotools is that a significant amount of other software  
automatically looks for, eg, automake, automake-1.9, in $PATH and if  
it finds it, sometimes modifies the way in which it builds itself.

You very quickly run into a situation where other ports build, or  
not, as the case may be, depending on whether auto{conf,make}* are  
already installed.  This "phantom" acquisition of dependencies causes  
no end of head-scratching when confronted with weird build errors.

This is certain one of the bigger reasons why the ports versions of  
autotools install in the way that they do (as opposed to the gnu-  
variants which install without such suffixes, but in locations where  
they're not automatically picked up on by other pieces of software).

Just another aspect of the fun and games to be had with these  
particular suites of automated building tools.

-aDe