make cannot configure protobuf and fails with aclocal: warning: couldn't open directory 'm4': No such file or directory

[harubyy]

Hi all,
I'm on ubuntu bionic. I followed you readme and did:
sudo apt-get -y install autoconf automake git libelf-dev libssl-dev pkg-config
git clone --recursive https://github.com/google/autofdo.git
cd autofdo/
aclocal -I .; autoheader; autoconf; automake --add-missing -c
./configure --with-llvm=$(which llvm-config-5.0)
make

then I get the error:
make all-am
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/harubyy/profiling/autofdo'
echo "[AUTOGEN] Preparing protobuf"
[AUTOGEN] Preparing protobuf
(cd third_party/protobuf ; autoreconf -f -i -Wall,no-obsolete)
aclocal: warning: couldn't open directory 'm4': No such file or directory
configure.ac:30: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_PROG_LIBTOOL
If this token and others are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow.
See the Autoconf documentation.
autoreconf: /usr/bin/autoconf failed with exit status: 1
Makefile:1590: recipe for target 'third_party/protobuf/configure' failed
make[1]: *** [third_party/protobuf/configure] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/harubyy/profiling/autofdo'
Makefile:567: recipe for target 'all' failed
make: *** [all] Error 2

I'm adding my config.log
config.log

m4 directory exits both at the top directory and in third_party/protobuf
Thanks!

[dkmichaels]

I also have this. Anyone gotten past this?

[JonathanMcDevitt]

I'm also having this problem when building gRPC. Platform is CentOS6, compiler is GCC 5.5. I simply run the below command:

make CC=gcc55 CXX=g++55 EXTRA_CXXFLAGS="-Wno-error=unused-variable"

Cares seems to have no problems with it, so I'm not sure why protobuf can't pick up the m4 directory that's in its root folder.

[todd-richmond]

I also have this. Anyone gotten past this?

Same issue here. We build a completely self contained toolchain and so don't use system RPMs. However, libtool, autoconf, and all other gnu tools are set on the PATH and are the absolute latest versions available

Does this configure system need to upgrade from AC_PROG_LIBTOOL to LT_INIT since AC_PROG_LIBTOOL has been deprecated for quite a few years

[nofiv]

The solution descibed in issue #38 worked for me, i.e. changing am__api_version='1.14' to am__api_version='1.15' in the configure file