Have autogen.sh copy in some files

[jepler]

Debian policy calls for these files not to be duplicated. However, we need to do it in a portable way (e.g., works on RPM-based systems so /usr/share/misc/config.guess is not OK; does not touch network, so doing curl/wget of the canonical config.guess file is not OK)

While there should be an obvious way to copy these files, there's .. not. This is the best I could come up with, using files from automake without actually invoking it.

While I did not actually BUILD on an rpm-based system, I checked the content of the automake rpm of fedora 36 and it looks like it should work.

I'd rather avoid the new build-time dependency on automake, but "automake --print-libdir" was the only 'portable' way I found to print the location of a directory containing config.guess, config.sub and install-sh.

Alternative to #1625
Closes #1628

[petterreinholdtsen]

Did you consider automake -ac ?

[jepler]

Yes, automake -ac refuses to work if it didn't think configure.ac uses automake. The whole auto* ecosystem feels very hostile to projects that don't want to use all parts of it.

[jepler]

jepler@bert:~/src/linuxcnc/src$ automake -ac
configure.ac: error: no proper invocation of AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE was found.
configure.ac: You should verify that configure.ac invokes AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE,
configure.ac: that aclocal.m4 is present in the top-level directory,
configure.ac: and that aclocal.m4 was recently regenerated (using aclocal)
automake: error: no 'Makefile.am' found for any configure output
jepler@bert:~/src/linuxcnc/src$ echo $?
1

[petterreinholdtsen]

After checking the alternative sources to find config.* and install-sh in Debian, three obvious packages are available, libtool, autotools-dev and automake. Of these three, the former and the latter seem equally out of place for linuxcnc, and autotools-dev is depricated. From this I conclude that your approach of copying them from automake is the best of these options. The only alternative I can think of is to fetch it from the source, ie wget from https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=config.git;a=blob_plain;f=config.guess and https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=config.git;a=blob_plain;f=config.sub . No idea where the latest edition of install-sh originates.

[jepler]

I did consider using the networked version, but aside from the problem with install-sh, network activity is either discouraged our outright forbidden during debian package building so it didn't seem like an improvement from the status quo.

[dwrobel]

checked the content of the automake rpm of fedora 36 and it looks like it should work.

FYI, I did a build with that change and it looks that it works on fedora-36 while it broke on fedora-35 log and CentOS-9 log:

configure: error: cannot find install-sh, install.sh, or shtool in "." "./.." "./../.."

The thing which affected it was that I'm not using autogen.sh but autoreconf to bootstrap sources.

Despite of that - it works while using:

• autoconf 2.71-2.fc36
• automake 1.16.5-7.fc36

but doesn't for the following:

• autoconf 2.69-37.fc35
• automake 1.16.2-5.fc35

Switching to use autogen.sh to boostrap fixed the issue. But I noticed the following differences:

1. Using autoreconf with -s allowed one to not install install-sh but generate symlinks (this is not possible when using autogen.sh)

$ rpm -qf /usr/bin/autoreconf
autoconf-2.71-2.fc36.noarch
$ autoreconf -sfi .
$ ls -ls install-sh
4 lrwxrwxrwx 1 dw dw 40 Aug 23 18:44 install-sh -> /usr/share/autoconf/build-aux/install-sh

2. autogen-sh uses automake --print-libdir to find install-sh and that produces on fedora-36:

$ automake --print-libdir
/usr/share/automake-1.16

while (as you might noticed above) autoreconf -sfi symlinked a file from a different location:

$ ls -ls install-sh
4 lrwxrwxrwx 1 dw dw 40 Aug 23 18:44 install-sh -> /usr/share/autoconf/build-aux/install-sh

Those two install-sh comes from two different packages:

$ rpm -qf /usr/share/automake-1.16/install-sh 
automake-1.16.5-7.fc36.noarch

[dw@fedora build-aux]$ rpm -qf /usr/share/autoconf/build-aux/install-sh 
autoconf-2.71-2.fc36.noarch

Happily, they are almost identical:

$ diff -u /usr/share/automake-1.16/install-sh  /usr/share/autoconf/build-aux/install-sh 
--- /usr/share/automake-1.16/install-sh	2020-11-14 04:47:59.000000000 +0100
+++ /usr/share/autoconf/build-aux/install-sh	2020-12-14 14:19:12.000000000 +0100
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-#!/bin/sh
+#!/usr/bin/sh
 # install - install a program, script, or datafile
 
 scriptversion=2020-11-14.01; # UTC

Summing up, if one wants to use autoreconf to boostrap sources then autoconf-2.71 or newer needs to be used.