Headaches from auto* and libtool...

[Henrik W Lund]

Greetings, list!

I've been given headaches lately, and I believe the auto* brothers and 
their buddy, libtool, to be the culprits. It all started when I 
installed Anjuta, the C/C++ IDE for GNOME. What it basically does for 
project management is use autoconf, automake and libtool to generate the 
  familiar ./configure script and its like. Now, this all works well and 
good up until the configure script is run. It will fail with the 
following message:

...
checking whether ln -s works... yes
loading cache /dev/null within ltconfig
ltconfig: you must specify a host type if you use `--no-verify'
Try `ltconfig --help' for more information
configure: error: libtool configure failed

Now, the pickle is that I've got 4 versions of libtool installed, 3 of 
which are registered in the package database. I've got libtool-1.3.4 
(not in the package database), libtool-1.3.5_2 (from origin 
devel/libtool13), libtool-1.4.3_3 (from origin devel/libtool14) and 
libtool-1.5.6 (from origin devel/libtool15). And with two versions each 
of both autoconf and automake installed, I'm suspecting that an 
unfortunate mix of versions of the various programs is what's causing 
this failure. I've googled around all day, and the error seems to be 
fairly common, but I've yet to find a clear answer.

I'll tell you what I've tried: I've tried playing with symlinking 
libtool and libtoolize to different versions of libtool (as the binaries 
are named libtool13, libtool14, etc), to no avail. I've tried editing 
./configure, removing the --no-verify flag, but this seems to always be 
replaced somehow. I've tried different macros in configure.in for 
autoconf, like AC_PROG_LIBTOOL and AC_CANONICAL_HOST, but still nothing. 
I've even tried different values for HOST as an environment variable.

I know it's not Anjuta, because the IDE doesn't even need to be running 
for the error to occur. Basically, I'm stumped. Can anyone here help me? 
What's so special about these three programs that require numerous 
versions of each installed on the same system? Or can I uninstall all 
the older versions, keeping only the newest? Will this even do me any good?

Thanks in advance!

-Henrik W Lund