[oe] autotools issues (MKINSTALLDIRS, -s_

[Jens Seidel]

On Sun, Aug 08, 2010 at 05:53:42PM +0200, Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:
> I'm not too good in autotools. While makeing the git recipe for urjtag
> I bumped into the following two issues:
> 
> First of all it seems autoreconf needs the -s flag. This tells to use
> symlinks. Guess things are done out of order or so.
> I've fixed this by adding EXTRA_AUTORECONF = "-s" to my recipes. That
> makes configure happy, but it does not really feel as a good solution.

Don't know about this.

> The second issue is that install fails.
> Apparently MKINSTALLDIRS does not have the proper value (it should be
> tools/mkinstalldirs, but it is an empty string).
> I've tried some things, peeked at some other patches for MKINSTALLDIRS
> but didn't really get to a satisfactory solution
 
> Any wizard here who can give me some guidance?

I noticed in the past also trouble with MKINSTALLDIRS and I think older
gettext versions are buggy and affect this. I workaround it with

AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external])
# version 0.11 doesn't support make distcheck, see
# http://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n/2009/09/msg00176.html
# versions 0.12-0.14.6 require a mkinstalldirs hack for make distcheck
# (at least for automake version 1.11)
MKINSTALLDIRS=\$\(top_srcdir\)/autotools/mkinstalldirs
AC_SUBST(MKINSTALLDIRS)
AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION(0.12)

in my configure.ac. Try increasing the version of the required gettext version
in the last line to verify that you have the same problem.

If you don't use gettext than I cannot help you ...

Jens