Headaches from auto* and libtool... (FOLLOW_UP)

[Henrik W Lund]

Henrik W Lund wrote:
> 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

Kinda following up on myself here, posting what I've found after several
more hours of digging around in documentation. Actually, as I'm typing
this, I found the solution.

For some reason, the autogen.sh script creates the configure script to
call ltconfig with the --no-verify flag. This causes ltconfig to rely on
having the host type passed along on the command line (something the
autogen-generated configure script does not do). The solution is simply
to pass it along to the configure script (not
--host=cpu-manufacturer-os-kernel, simply cpu-manufacturer-os-kernel).

There may be some obscure autoconf feature to prevent it from putting
the --no-verify flag into the configure script (why is there even a --no
-verify flag???), but I've yet to find one.

Anyways, since I've answered my own question, I thought I'd just as well
document it. :-)

Cheers!
-Henrik W Lund