where is autoconf

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2005-03-02 23:15, Stefan Seefeld <seefeld at sympatico.ca> wrote:
>Kris Kennaway wrote:
>>Someone whose attribution has been trimmed, wrote:
>>> Well, I was looking for 'autoconf' in these files but didn't find it.
>>> And indeed, even though I have 'autoconf-2.59_2' installed, all I have
>>> is 'autoconf259', but not 'autoconf'.
>>
>> This is necessary because the autoconf developers don't understand why
>> backwards compatibility is important for their tools (new versions
>> like 2.59 cannot be used to build old applications that were written
>> for e.g. 2.13, nor can multiple versions of autoconf be easily
>> installed concurrently).
>
> I'm aware of these (very unfortunate) incompatibilities, though I had
> expected the problem to be dealt with differently (for example by
> setting a symbolic link to the currently active version).

Unfortunately, this won't help.  There is not a single executable, or a
simple set of files that one can symlink and have autoconf magically
just work(TM).

>> You can use the gnu-autoconf and related ports, which installs into
>> /usr/local/gnu-autotools so they do not poison the build environment
>> of other ports.  YOu might have to play games with PATH or other
>> variables to get your application to find them.
>
> Ok, thanks for the explanation.

I usually use a similar trick to synchronize the versions of autoconf,
automake, libtool on Linux, Solaris and BSD.  I manually install the
tools with --prefix=/opt/gnu and prepend "/opt/gnu/bin:/opt/gnu/sbin" to
my PATH whenever I need to use these.