Commented by: @AlexPeshkoff

Works for me using:

autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.63
automake (GNU automake) 1.10.2

I'm not 100% sure, should we better avoid mutlilines or require fresh tools. Let's wait what others say.

Commented by: @pmakowski

what a bad news :(

Mike as an immediate solution you can setup fresher tools (see for example http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/pipermail/click/2008-November/007444.html)

Firebird 2.5, autoconf 2.6 and automake 1.10 will never be in official Centos / EPEL repositories , it would break their rules.

So if someone wanted to build Firebird for Centos 5, or make rpm for this distro, he have to patch it self the sources.

And for what I see in Distrowatch, Centos 5.4, RH 5,4 is the last distro stil maintained using these old version of autoconf and automake, even the oldest Debian maintained (4.0 Etch) is using autoconf 2.6 and automake 1.10

I don't think that the Firebird project have to solve this issue.
But I think we should put somewhere in the Release Notes and/or readme that autoconf 2.6 and automake 1.10 are the minimal version to build Firebird 2.5

Commented by: @AlexPeshkoff

We have required version check in http://autogen.sh. Should I change requiements in it?

Commented by: Mike Pomraning (pilcrow)

makowski wrote:
> Firebird 2.5, autoconf 2.6 and automake 1.10 will never be in official Centos / EPEL repositories ,
> it would break their rules.

Agreed. However, I'd encourage you to make contemporary CentOS/Red Hat support as easy as possible, to improve Firebird's market penetration (at least in the U.S. enterprise). It's very easy for the CentOS/RH admin or developer to install current Postgres, Oracle-XE or DB2 Express-C from 3rd-party repos, FWIW.

Either reworking UDF_COMMENT -- which seems a very small and easy thing to me -- or updating the http://autogen.sh requirements, as alexpeshkoff suggested, to the toolset shipped with the oldest OS that the FB developers do wish to support. If CentOS/RH isn't part of that officially supported list, I'll continue to patch around it. :)

Thanks for looking in to this issue.

Commented by: @AlexPeshkoff

Taking into an account, that autoconf suite is to be run only at developers' boxes (for install one should use prebuilt configure in tarball), version check is correct solution here.