[ntp:questions] Problem building ntp in an rev. controlled environment

Dave Hart davehart at gmail.com
Wed Dec 29 16:46:46 UTC 2010


On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 3:55 PM, bombjack <bombjack99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> @Dave H: Thank you so much for the clarification! I was about to give
> up this task, but now I know how to proceed. I will try your
> suggestions and get back with the results. I will have to wait with
> this until next year though, as both automake and autoconf are
> outdated on my system and there is nothing I can do about it as I
> haven't got root access to the system.

There is no need to wait for root assistance, if you're willing to
spend a little time on it.  What you can do is build Automake and
Autoconf yourself, and ensure your local copies are earlier on your
$PATH than the outdated system ones.  You might want to pass a
--prefix argument to the automake and autoconf configure scripts, to
target "make install" at your home directory.

cd
mkdir src
cd src
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.11.1.tar.bz2
tar jxvf a*.1.tar.bz2
cd a*.1
./configure --prefix=$HOME && make && make check
# assuming no problems
make install

That should leave you with a $HOME/usr/local/bin/automake, so that if
you arrange to put $HOME/usr/local/bin early in your $PATH it will be
used in preference to the systemwide automake.  You can test with
something like:

env "PATH=$HOME/usr/local/bin:$PATH" $SHELL

which will give you a subshell with the altered search path.  Do not
be overly discouraged if you hit a snag, such as discovering you need
a newer version of some tool to build the latest automake or autoconf
-- just repeat the process to get a local copy of the prerequisite
tool working, then pick up where you left off, or to play it safe rm
the previous attempt and start over from the tar extraction.

This approach is also useful to test updated tools without affecting
the systemwide versions.

Cheers,
Dave Hart



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