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 t

Answer 1

I think the touch command is the right answer e.g. do something like

touch --date="`date`" aclocal.m4 Makefile.am configure Makefile.in

before [./configure && make].

Sidebar I: Otherwise, I agree with @kaz: adding dependencies for aclocal.m4 and/or configure and/or Makefile.am and/or Makefile.in makes assumptions about the target system that may be invalid. Specifically, those assumptions are

1) that all target systems have autotools,

2) that all target systems have the same version of autotools (e.g. automake.1.15 in this case).

3) that if either (1) or (2) are not true for any user, that the user is extracting the package from a maintainer-produced TAR or ZIP format that maintains timestamps of the relevant files, in which case all autotool/configure/Makefile.am/Makefile.in dependencies in the configure-generated Makefile will be satisfied before the make command is issued.

The second assumption fails on many Mac systems because automake.1.14 is the "latest" for OSX (at least that is what I see in MacPorts, and apparently the same is true for brew).

The third assumption fails spectacularly in a world with Github. This failure is an example of an "everyone thinks they are normative" mindset; specifically, the maintainers, who are the only class of users that should need to edit Makefile.am, have now put everyone into that class.

Perhaps there is an option in autowhatever that keeps these dependencies from being added to Makefile.in and/or Makefile.

Sidebar II [Why @kaz is right]: of course it is obvious, to me and other cognoscenti, to simply try a sequence of [touch] commands to fool the configure-created Makefile from re-running configure and the autotools. But that is not the point of configure; the point of configure is to ensure as many users on as many different systems as as possible can simply do [./configure && make] and move on; most users are not interested in "shaving the yak" e.g. debugging faulty assumptions of the autotools developers.

Sidebar III: it could be argued that ./configure, now that autotools adds these dependencies, is the wrong build tool to use with Github-distributed packages.

Sidebar IV: perhaps configure-based Github repos should put the necessary touch command into their readme, e.g. https://github.com/drbitboy/Tycho2_SQLite_RTree.