Building on Debian 12 Bookworm needs autoreconf step

[damienvancouver]

When compiling on Debian 12 bookworm (stable), running "./configure" then "make" yields the error:

WARNING: 'automake-1.17' is missing on your system.
You should only need it if you modified 'Makefile.am' or
'configure.ac' or m4 files included by 'configure.ac'.
make: *** [Makefile:340: Makefile.in] Error 1

Running: autoreconf -f -i fixes it, then make correctly builds. Debian bookworm has automake 1.16.5-1.3 so that is probably the reason.

we could just mention this extra step in the build instructions as one way around this!

[nethappen]

Yes, I just got feedback recently that it stopped compiling e.g. on the latest Archlinux version.
So I did autoreconf --install on the latest Archlinux and tested it on Gentoo too and included this working new version.
I see that it doesn't work on older Debians, maybe on others somewhere else too. autoreconf -f -i fixes the problem.
But we need to find a universal solution to this problem.