Talk:Windows

Errors in building autoconf: autom4te: need GNU m4 1.4 or later: /bin/m4

Hi everyone. I spent some of the Thanksgiving weekend trying to build GNUCash in Windows. Everything proceeded fairly well until I got to the autotools section of the build, at which point I got a vague error about requiring m4 version 1.4 or later. Here is the last little bit of the make output before the crash:

make[2]: Leaving directory `/c/soft/tmp/autoconf-2.60/lib/m4sugar'
autom4te_perllibdir='..'/lib AUTOM4TE_CFG='../lib/autom4te.cfg'
../bin/autom4te -B '..'/lib -B '..'/lib --language M4sh --cache 
--melt ./autoconf.as -o autoconf.in
The system cannot find the path specified.
autom4te: need GNU m4 1.4 or later: /bin/m4
make[1]: *** [autoconf.in] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/c/soft/tmp/autoconf-2.60/bin'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

On a second try, after only installing msys 1.0.10 and nothing else, and running install.sh, the inst_dtk section outputs:

############################################################
###  MSYS DTK
############################################################
msys dtk already installed.  skipping.

which confuses me. I didn't install the DTK.

New thought: looking at the inst_dtk function, it checks if "perl --help" returns. I had ActivePerl pre-installed, so that may be the problem, because that test thinks the MSYS DTK is already installed whereas in reality only ActivePerl had been installed.

Okay, forcing the DTK install got it past the m4 error listed above. Looks like my original install of ActivePerl was the problem. I commented out the check for "perl --help" in install.sh, restarted install.sh, and the build seems to be going along fine now. I'll let you know if I run into another issue. Thanks! --scbash 21:06, 27 November 2006 (EST)

Thanks for explaining the solution here. I've changed the check for MSYS DTK now so that it looks for the perl executable at the MSYS location. I hope this should fix this issue for others. Eventually this whole section should be moved to the Windows page, into the troubleshooting section near the bottom. --Cstim 03:56, 28 November 2006 (EST)

Thanks for the nice cleanup. The discussion is a lot easier to follow now. The build finished somewhere around 2AM this morning, and I can start GNUCash, though I get a few error messages printed to the console. Where should discussions of runtime issues go? The mailing list or another page in this wiki? --Scbash 09:46, 28 November 2006 (EST)

Updates required to automated build scripts

• During my clean build tonight I had to change custom.sh to point to mingw 5.1.0. The 5.0.3 installer references mirror sites that don't seem to have the required files anymore. --scbash 20:46, 27 November 2006 (EST)
• Also had to update libxml to 2.6.27 --Scbash 21:24, 27 November 2006 (EST)

Thanks. I've updated the version numbers in custom.sh accordingly. --Cstim 03:56, 28 November 2006 (EST)