More Automake and Libtool Mystery

Initially I based my boot menu system around the EFL Snapshots from Juli 29th. The idea was to start with some known to work state instead of a randomly picked svn revision. Once I had everything compiled I wanted to run the elementary hello world application. Unfortunately all I got was a completely white screen. But hey it didn’t segfault which is progress.

I then decided to update to a more recent svn revision to see whether it was an upstream error which got fixed in the meantime or if it was an error on my side. I choose the same revision as the OpenWRT folks. Again with the idea that it had worked for others before. Because I was now checking out upstream sources I needed to run aclocal, auto{header,conf,make} and libtoolize to generate the actual Makefiles etc. Unfortunately this didn’t quite work out for me because apperently automake-1.11 doesn’t like trailing slashes. This just shows how fragile the whole autohell system actually is.

I then decided to update to current svn HEAD because the latest and greatest should have all the bugs fixed, right? By the way this added Lua as a dependency. Unfortunately this resulted in build errors whenever a library package had it’s library compiled and wanted to link against it later during the build. For some yet unknown reason libtool wasn’t linking the binaries against the required libraries. After some head scratching I compared the libtool script as shipped with the EFL snapshots from Juli and the one generated by me locally. The crucial difference was the following line:

# Whether libtool must link a program against all its dependency libraries.
link_all_deplibs=no

Don’t know yet why it was set to no in the first place but I decided to go with the quick and dirty solution for now and added a sed one liner to set the variable value to unknown after the ./configure stage. The build succeeded, Yay!

With this whole thing I wasted another few hours and unfortunately the end result was the same (the elementary hello world application just showed a white screen).

On the upside I am now on the bleeding edge enlightenment stuff which was the only sane thing to do in the long run anyway.

Marc