In trying my first compile of Bookcase under Mandrake 9.1, I ran into the dreaded version incompatibility of autoconf and automake. Mandrake ships with defaults of autoconf 2.13 and automake 1.4 something. KDE requires autoconf 2.5+ which in turns requires automake 1.6+. I think…And on top of that, Mandrake made KDevelop conflict with autoconf 2.5+. That was rather dumb, I think.

The biggest problem, though, is that the newest version of autoconf, which is 2.57, doesn’t seem to work with automake 1.7.1. Got all that? These are mostly guesses.

But the acinclude.m4 file I copied from KDE requires autoconf 2.54+. The error I get then is

configure.in:129: error: m4_popdef: undefined macro: AC_Dest
autoconf/status.m4:844: AC_CONFIG_FILES is expanded from...
configure.in:129: the top level
autom4te-2.5x: /usr/bin/m4 failed with exit status: 1

Sigh… I need to downgrade something for sure, but what…