Autoconf and Automake on Mac OS X Mountain Lion

It's summer and I've been thinking about blogging more regularly again. I'm usually too busy to find time to blog, so I'm going to try a shorter format this time: sort of middle ground between a tweet and a full blown blog.

So, here's my first entry in that shorter format.

If you're upgrading to Mac OS X Mountain Lion and Xcode 4.4.1, you'll find that Xcode does not include anymore the GNU Autoconf, Automake and Libtool build tools used by most open source projects to generate makefiles and dynamic libraries... That's not so great :(

I wanted to share what I did to build them myself from source, as it could help others too:

export build=~/devtools # or wherever you'd like to build
mkdir -p $build

cd $build
curl -OL http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/autoconf/autoconf-2.68.tar.gz
tar xzf autoconf-2.68.tar.gz
cd autoconf-2.68
./configure --prefix=$build/autotools-bin
make
make install
export PATH=$PATH:$build/autotools-bin/bin

cd $build
curl -OL http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/automake/automake-1.11.tar.gz
tar xzf automake-1.11.tar.gz
cd automake-1.11
./configure --prefix=$build/autotools-bin
make
make install

cd $build
curl -OL http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/libtool/libtool-2.4.tar.gz
tar xzf libtool-2.4.tar.gz
cd libtool-2.4
./configure --prefix=$build/autotools-bin
make
make install

Notice how I configured to install in --prefix=$build/autotools-bin? You can also omit that to install the tools in your system dirs if you want. I usually install what I build under my own user dir to avoid polluting the system dirs, but it's really your choice.

Hope this helps