[Xastir] Problem under debian "Etch"

[Tom Russo]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 10:28:00AM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <archer at eskimo.com> flavor, containing:
> On Fri, 20 Apr 2007, Tom Russo wrote:
> 
> > I have seen this before, it has always been the result of using a version
> > of autoconf/automake that is too old.
> 
> You're late to the party, but your info is spot-on.  ;-)

That'll learn me to respond to the middle of threads.

> FAQ question 4.29 now has this and other debugging info in it for
> this exact error plus other missing file/bad config file sorts of
> problems.  Add/revise the text there as necessary.

The first thing to check in that question should be automake/autoconf, the
other stuff would be red herrings.  This question has come up before and
the XASTIR_DATA_BASE variable not being properly set in the makefile is
the normal culprit --- we talked about not doing it that way, but apparently
there's something about the GNU coding standard that requires it to be this
way.  Each time it's come up, it has always been automake/autoconf versions
that were to blame.

Somewhere in our FAQ we list the minimum versions required. I'm not sure
if those minimum versions are even the right ones anymore.  I'm using 
autoconf 2.59 and automake 1.9.6 these days and they're fine.  We might want
to do a quick survey of which versions are actually working properly, and
get that codified in the FAQ more explicitly.  Right now it just says
autoconf 2.53 or later and automake 1.6.3 or later.  If those versions
still work, great, but if newer versions *don't* work we need to know that
*AND* fix our configure script so it *does* work with newer versions.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is
 one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh,
 oooh, the sky is the limit!"  --- The Tick