Error building gnucash 1.8.12 on OpenSuSE 10.0

[Christian Krause]

Hi,

On Fri, 21 Oct 2005 10:08:16 +0200, Christian Stimming wrote:
> Rauch Christian schrieb:
>> Christian Stimming schrieb:
>>>> But still one question remains just for my understanding.
>>>> Why is the argument --build sufficient for 1.8.11, but 1.8.12 needs all
>>>> three on the same building system without any changes?
>>> 
>>> Read my answer ;-) .  I didn't say that the difference is between 1.8.11 and
>>> 1.8.12, but instead the difference is between building/configuring from your
>>> rpm spec file and building by manual ./configure.
>> I read your answer and i build both from spec, not from manual ./configure.

> Oka-ay. (Again you should've said that in your original question, as we
> otherwise have to guess you are talking about the manual ./configure.) 
> I don't know. Maybe it was because of your extra rpmbuild argument
> --target=i686? Maybe because the ./configure script of 1.8.11 came from
> a different version of autoconf than the one of 1.8.12? Maybe you had
> the command "autoreconf" in your
> 1.8.11 spec file? 

I've had the same problem on my system, but I've tracked it down:

The problem is the different config.guess.
gnucash-1.8.11:
@:~/BUILD/gnucash-1.8.11$ ./config.guess 
i686-pc-linux-gnu

gnucash-1.8.12:
@:~BUILD/gnucash-1.8.12$ ./config.guess 
i686-pc-linux

That's why the configure scripts assumes that the linker is not capable
to deal with dynamic libs and that's why only static libs are built.

This has nothing to do with rpm or spec files or different invocations
or arguments of configure.. This occurs even if you just unpack the
tarball and call ./config.guess - nothing more.


To solve the problem just copy a more recent version of config.guess to
your gnucash-1.8.12 directory.

on my system (libtool 1.5.20):
cp /usr/share/libtool/config.guess BUILD/gnucash-1.8.12


> Honestly I don't really care because the rpm spec file
> introduces so many extra potential side-effects that it's quite
> pointless to try to track these down in detail. It's good enough
> once the build is working.

As I already said, the problem has nothing to the with the rpm or spec
files. The reason for such problems is, that some packaged files, like
config.guess, configure, ... are not in CVS. They are autogenerated
(by calling ./autogen.sh, autoreconf or whatever). So the content of
these files depends directly no the installed autotools-toolchain
(automake, libtool, autoconf, ...) of the maintainer which pulls the
CVS and builds the package. That means, that if another maintainer has
different versions of these tools then you'll get completly different
autoconf/libtool-generated (e.g. config.guess) files in the tarball.

So the side effects come from the maintainer's auto* toolchain version. ;-)


Nevertheless the packaged config.guess seems to be broken and/or
outdated. I've checked some config.guess files from different
distributions on my system:

1. libtool-1.5.20 (most recent version on gnu.org):
/usr/share/libtool/config.guess 
i686-pc-linux-gnu
/usr/share/libtool/libltdl/config.guess
i686-pc-linux-gnu
-> correct

2. libtool-1.5.16 (FC4):
./config.guess 
i686-pc-linux-gnu
-> correct

3. libtool-1.5.14 (suse 9.3):
./config.guess
i686-pc-linux
-> wrong

4. libtool-1.5.18 (suse 10.0):
@:~/libtool-package-install/usr$ find |grep guess
./share/libtool/config.guess
./share/libtool/libltdl/config.guess
@:~/libtool-package-install/usr$ ./share/libtool/config.guess
i686-pc-linux
-> wrong
@:~/libtool-package-install/usr$ ./share/libtool/libltdl/config.guess
i686-pc-linux-gnu
-> correct

5. autotools-dev 20050422.1 (debian stable):
./config.guess
i686-pc-linux-gnu
-> correct


Because of all these informations I've come to the conclusion that
gnucash delivers an outdated or broken config.guess, because the
tarball was prepared (especially the autogenerated autotools-depended
files were built) on a distribution with a strange config.guess. From my
tests I would assume it was a Suse. ;-)


Best regards,
Christian