FreeTDS Development Group

[Steve Langasek <vorlon AT netexpress.net>]

James,

On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 01:30:54PM -0400, Lowden, James K wrote:
> > From: bizard [mailto:bizard AT propellerheads.com]
> > Sent: October 15, 2002 12:48 PM

> > I tried the above with the latest nightly tarball (after 
> > making a couple of changes to get it to compile at 
> > all...documented below) and ran into the problem that 
> > apparently my autoconf is not up to date enough.  It claims 
> > to need 2.54 and I have 2.52.

> Hold on.  Thanks very much for the report, but something doesn't make sense
> to me.  You're not supposed to need autoanything to use the tarball.  You're
> only supposed to need make and cc, and I guess libtool these days.
> Definitely not autoconf/automake.  

> If you unpack the tarball and run ./configure and get a complaint about
> autoconf, we're doing something wrong.  

Have I mentioned this week how much I *love* libtool? :)

Whereas most pieces of the autotools toolchain follow the principle of
"test for features, not platforms", libtool is a kludgy piece of script
that embeds *extensive* information about individual platforms, and uses
this information to decide how to "properly" build libraries (shared or
static).  This means that, while you can get autoconf itself to do the
right thing on many platforms with a little nudge, libtool will not work
correctly on any platform whose feature set hasn't been programmed into
it.

The version of libtool you had on your computer when rolling the last
official release is a bit old; old enough that it doesn't know how to
automatically build shared libs on OS X.  This is why rerunning
libtoolize --force --copy && aclocal && automake && autoconf on an OS X
machine fixes the build scripts so that they work correctly for shared
libs.  This version difference also accounts for minor weirdness with the
last FreeTDS (two zeroes instead of three after the '.so').

Since we do have users on platforms not covered by libtool 1.4a, I would
recommend installing a newer libtool (I use 1.4.2a) on whatever machines
will be used for rolling official tarballs.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

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