On Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 01:50:55PM +0100, Brett Parker wrote:

Chris Green chris@areti.co.uk wrote:

...

I'm trying to configure a utility using autoconf, when I run ./configure I get all the usual checking sort of stuff, then at the end:-

checking for XShapeCombineMask in -lXext... no
checking for jpeg_destroy_compress in -ljpeg... no
not updating unwritable cache ./config.cache
creating ./config.status
sed: can't read confdefs.h: No such file or directory
creating autoconf/Makefile.defines
sed: can't read ./autoconf/Makefile.defines.in: No such file or
directory
creating autoconf/Makefile.common
sed: can't read ./autoconf/Makefile.common.in: No such file or
directory
creating autoconf/Makefile.common.lib
sed: can't read ./autoconf/Makefile.common.lib.in: No such file or
directory
creating Makefile
sed: can't read ./Makefile.in: No such file or directory
creating config.h
cat: ./autoconf/config.h.in: No such file or directory
config.h is unchanged

... but all those errors are nonsense, there is a writable ./config.cache (created earlier by autoconf) and the autoconf directory does exist and has those files in it.

What am I missing?

Only thing I can think of, off the top of my not-yet-caffienated-enough head is that you may have some permissions problems, are you running configure as the same user you ran autoconf as?

also: not updating unwritable cache ./config.cache

would suggest to me that you can't make files in that directory, which leads to it being a permissions problem...

In the directory where I'm running ./configure I can quite happile write to ./config.cache myself.

However there's something fundamentally wrong, I've just noticed that ./configure is creating files and directories in the *parent* directory for some wierd reason. I've just cleared out config.h config.status Makefile and an autoconf directory in the directory above where I'm running ./configure, then I ran it again and it's recreated them 'above' again!

On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 12:49:14AM +0100, Owen Synge wrote:

Very odd

i would run autogen.sh (programers pre-distribution script) if thier is one and see if it worked, have you tried

It was some sort of corruption of the configure script, with some extra confusion caused by my CDPATH!

I had the original code for the utility stored in a directory away from $HOME which happened to have the same name as I was using for my modified code in my $HOME. I had my CDPATH set up without '.' at the front so every time I thought I was navigating to the original code my final 'cd' took me back to my modified code!

When I sorted this out and went and built the original code it worked OK so I copied the configure script from there to the directory with my changed code and that built OK as well.

I've just looked at what I *think* are the differences between the good and bad configure scripts and - I'm still totally in the dark, the differences are:-

borg$ diff configure configure.good 69,76d68 < #if [ -f HPUX.Install ] < #then < # # HP-UX overrides < # prefix=/opt/astime; RANLIB="/bin/true" < # with_xpm_includes="/opt/xpm/include" < # with_xpm_library="/opt/xpm/lib/X11" < #fi <

Huh? :-)

I must admit it brings home the difficulties and risks of trying to to program development on two different platforms. I've been doing this on Linux at home and Solaris at work, transferring the changed source back and forth as I went.