building gnucash with guile-1.8

[Geert Janssens]

On Tuesday 18 November 2014 06:49:43 John Ralls wrote:
> > On Nov 18, 2014, at 1:00 AM, Geert Janssens
> > <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:> 
> > On Thursday 13 November 2014 20:38:29 Stuart McGraw wrote:
> >> On 11/13/2014 05:53 PM, John Ralls wrote:
> >>> On Nov 13, 2014, at 1:29 PM, Stuart McGraw <smcg4191 at frii.com>
> >>> wrote:
> >>> [...]
> >>> 
> >>>> But when I try with gnucash-2.6.4. ./configure complains:
> >>>> [...]
> >>>> checking for guile-1.8 >= 1.8.5... yes
> >>>> checking GUILE_CFLAGS... -pthread
> >>>> checking GUILE_LIBS... -lguile
> >>>> checking for guile... /usr/bin/guile
> >>>> checking for Guile version >= 2.0...
> >>>> configure: error: Guile 2.0 required, but 1.8.8 found
> >>> 
> >>> [...]
> >>> 
> >>> Where did you get GnuCash 2.6.4 from?
> >> 
> >> The download link on gnucash.org.
> > 
> > Hmm, so you started from the release tarball ?
> > 
> > @John:
> > Did you generate the tarball against guile 2.0 ? That would mean the
> > GUILE_PROGS macro in configure.ac would have been expanded from the
> > guile-2.0 sources and possibly causing this issue.
> 
> Yes, I think I did. That would be a Guile bug if you're right,
> configuration macros should be version neutral.

Reading the generated configure file at some point the value of GUILE_EFFECTIVE_VERSION is 
evaluated. If that environment variable is not set it defaults to 2.0 (again from the configure 
file). It is then checked if the version of guile as found is >= to this effective version. Guile 1.8 
obviously is not, resulting in the error message Stuart gets. That's why I suggested to set 
GUILE_EFFECTIVE_VERSION. Although I don't know if that would work or not.

I'm not really good with m4 language. Reading guile.m4 however it looks like we could fix this 
in our configure.ac by using [GUILE_PROGS ([1.8])] instead of just [GUILE_PROGS] in the test 
block for guile 1.8.

> > Is there a way to recreate configure from configure.ac starting from
> > the tarball ?
> Yes, just run autoreconf -f.
Ah, that may be the best solution then.

Geert