[Xapian-discuss] building on RHEL 5/CentOS 5

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 12:08:15PM +0100, Tim Brody wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-08-23 at 11:13 +0100, Tim Brody wrote:
> > RHEL5 has autoconf 2.59 and automake 1.9.6.
> 
> rpmbuild calls "autoreconf --force". I *guess* this is intentional, as I
> haven't found a way to disable it.

Looking at /usr/lib/rpm/macros on an Ubuntu box, it looks like you just
need to create a file "NO-AUTO-GEN" in the same directory as configure.

> The solution may be to add a patch for building RPMs but life is easier
> if the core tarballs can be built without further changes.

Keeping support for such old versions of autoconf and automake comes at a
cost though - every time you want to modify the build system you need to 
consider if the features being used are supported far enough back.  And
it is hard for people to test since they would need to install these old
versions from source specially on most current distros.

For reference, autoconf 2.59 was released 2003-11-04 - that's older than
Xapian 0.7.5!

So I'm reluctant to go that route.  Hopefully "NO-AUTO-GEN" works.

Cheers,
    Olly