How to overcome "'aclocal-1.15' is missing on your system" warning?

Question

Im trying to run a c++ program on github. (available at the following link https://github.com/mortehu/text-classifier)

I have a mac, and am trying to run it in the terminal. I think I have downloaded autoconf and automake but am not sure. To run the program I am going to the correct folder in terminal then running

./configure && make 

But I get the error:

WARNING: 'aclocal-1.15' is missing on your system. You should only need it if you modified 'acinclude.m4' or 'configure.ac' or m4 files included by 'configure.ac'. The 'aclocal' program is part of the GNU Automake package: http://www.gnu.org/software/automake It also requires GNU Autoconf, GNU m4 and Perl in order to run: http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf http://www.gnu.org/software/m4/ http://www.perl.org/ make: *** [aclocal.m4] Error 127

I have xcode and g++ and all the things required to run c programs, but as is probably obvious, I have no idea what Im doing.

What is the easiest, simplest way to run the program in the above link? I realise it comes with a readme and example usage but I can not get that to work.

Answer 1

Before running ./configure try running autoreconf -f -i. The autoreconf program automatically runs autoheader, aclocal, automake, autopoint and libtoolize as required.

Edit to add: This is usually caused by checking out code from Git instead of extracting it from a .zip or .tar.gz archive. In order to trigger rebuilds when files change, Git does not preserve files' timestamps, so the configure script might appear to be out of date. As others have mentioned, there are ways to get around this if you don't have a sufficiently recent version of autoreconf.

Another edit: This error can also be caused by copying the source folder extracted from an archive with scp to another machine. The timestamps can be updated, suggesting that a rebuild is necessary. To avoid this, copy the archive and extract it in place.

Answer 2

Often, you don't need any auto* tools and the simplest solution is to simply run touch aclocal.m4 configure in the relevant folder (and also run touch on Makefile.am and Makefile.in if they exist). This will update the timestamp of aclocal.m4 and remind the system that aclocal.m4 is up-to-date and doesn't need to be rebuilt. After this, it's probably best to empty your build directory and rerun configure from scratch after doing this. I run into this problem regularly. For me, the root cause is that I copy a library (e.g. mpfr code for gcc) from another folder and the timestamps change.

Of course, this trick isn't valid if you really do need to regenerate those files, perhaps because you have manually changed them. But hopefully the developers of the package distribute up-to-date files.

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And of course, if you do want to install automake and friends, then use the appropriate package-manager for your distribution.

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Install aclocal which comes with automake:

brew install automake          # for Mac
apt-get install automake       # for Ubuntu

Try again:

./configure && make 

Answer 3

You can install the version you need easily:

First get source:

$ wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.15.tar.gz

Unpack it:

$ tar -xzvf automake-1.15.tar.gz

Build and install:

$ cd automake-1.15
$ ./configure  --prefix=/opt/aclocal-1.15
$ make
$ sudo mkdir -p /opt
$ sudo make install

Use it:

$ export PATH=/opt/aclocal-1.15/bin:$PATH
$ aclocal --version

aclocal (GNU automake) 1.15

Now when aclocal is called, you get the right version.

Answer 4

A generic answer that may or not apply to this specific case:

As the error message hint at, aclocal-1.15 should only be required if you modified files that were used to generate aclocal.m4

If you don't modify any of those files (including configure.ac) then you should not need to have aclocal-1.15.

In my case, the problem was not that any of those files was modified but somehow the timestamp on configure.ac was 6 minutes later compared to aclocal.m4.

I haven't figured out why, but a clean clone of my git repo solved the issue for me. Maybe something linked to git and how it created files in the first place.

Rather than rerunning autoconf and friends, I would just try to get a clean clone and try again.

It's also possible that somebody committed a change to configure.ac but didn't regenerate the aclocal.m4, in which case you indeed have to rerun automake and friends.