MySQL Bugs: #58263: The Autotools should not be required to build Workbench

Bug #58263	The Autotools should not be required to build Workbench
Submitted:	17 Nov 2010 17:05	Modified:	13 Dec 2010 13:59
Reporter:	John Bollinger	Email Updates:
Status:	Closed	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Workbench	Severity:	S3 (Non-critical)
Version:	5.2.29	OS:	Any
Assigned to:	Alfredo Kojima	CPU Architecture:	Any
Tags:	build

Description:
It should not be necessary for the GNU autotools to be installed locally on the build host to build Workbench.  Indeed, it is an express goal of the autotools design that they should be needed only by package maintainers, not by (other) builders.

Other than placing unneeded constraints on people wishing to build the package, relying on running the autotools locally at build time (as opposed to running the configure scripts they create) risks build bugs related to different autotools versions being used than the ones used by the package maintainers.

How to repeat:
1) Download and unpack the source tarball mysql-workbench-gpl-5.2.29-src.tar.gz

2) Change to the source directory

3) run ./configure

4) observe that autoconf and/or automake are invoked for several subpackages before they are configured

Suggested fix:
One solution would be to manually run automake and autoconf in each subdirectory.  That could be scripted, of course.

Alternatively, running "autoreconf --install --force" in the package root directory prior to creating the distribution ought to have the same effect, plus it will copy over any missing utility scripts (instead of linking them) and ensure that the correct versions of the utility scripts are included.  That will not, however, have any effect on subdirectories that automake is not informed about.

this has been fixed, thank you for the report.

fix confirmed in repository

An entry has been added to the 5.2.31 changelog:

Autotools were required to be installed locally in order to build MySQL Workbench from source.