Autoconf not creating makefile?

Question

I am currently trying to create an installation package using autoconf to create a configuration file. However, I was able to automatically generate them, however, when I run ./configure , the makefile is not created from Makefile.in .

My question is: how to debug this problem to narrow it down, why does it fail?

The following is the error message that I get when I try to create a Makefile:

 configure: error: cannot find install-sh, install.sh, or shtool 

Answer 1

I had the same problem when I updated the autotools version, in my case the following line was missing in the configure.ac file:

 AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.9 foreign]) 

(Insert any version or parameters you need)

Then run autoreconf --install .

To answer the debugging question: I went and looked at similar configure.ac files and worked through the differences until the error went away.

Answer 2

First of all, make sure configure.ac contains something like:

 AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile]) AC_OUTPUT 

Otherwise, it will not create a makefile for you.

If this is not the case, config.log should know what is going wrong.

Answer 3

found out that I need to get rid of ac_dirs from the configuration file, this fixed the problem

Answer 4

I had this problem and I found that this was due to the following line in configure.ac :

 AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR([build-aux]) 

The line was not bad in itself, but it had to be moved closer to the top of the configure.ac file.