Unable to build GNU automake

Question

Installed automake using wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.15.tar.gz

./configure --prefix=$HOME/local works fine for me.

After this step, I ran make and it fails:

  GEN      bin/automake
  GEN      bin/aclocal
  GEN      t/ax/shell-no-trail-bslash
  GEN      t/ax/cc-no-c-o
  GEN      runtest
  GEN      lib/Automake/Config.pm
  GEN      doc/aclocal-1.15.1
  GEN      doc/automake-1.15.1
help2man: can't get `--help' info from automake-1.15
Try `--no-discard-stderr' if option outputs to stderr
make: *** [doc/automake-1.15.1] Error 2

I do not know how to proceed!

Another thing is I try to run bin/aclocal and it says:

Can't locate Automake/Config.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /home/v/varun/local/share/automake-1.15 /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 .) at bin/aclocal line 37.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at bin/aclocal line 37.

Please help!

Do you need any other questions?

Answer 1

Most likely, you must either downgrade your Perl version, or update the version of automake that you're trying to build:

The help2man program tries to run automake-1.15 --help. If this fails, then you will see the error above. In my case, the original failure looked like this:

$ ./1.15-r0/build/t/wrap/automake-1.15 --help
Unescaped left brace in regex is illegal here in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/\${ <-- HERE ([^ \t=:+{}]+)}/ at /home/user/proj/yocto/test/build/tmp/work/x86_64-linux/automake-native/1.15-r0/build/bin/automake line 3939.
Compilation failed in require at ./1.15-r0/build/t/wrap/automake-1.15 line 27.

This is caused by an incompatibility between automake version 1.15 and a too recent Perl version (see this bug).

Answer 2

perl-Thread-Queue.noarch needed;

if your os is centos, try this:

yum install perl-Thread-Queue.noarch