Autotools

MSYS2 ships with multiple versions of autotools related tools such as autoconf and automake. To make things easier for developers we provide meta packages which depend on all the usual packages needed to re-configure an autotools based project:

pacman -S "${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-autotools" # for mingw
pacman -S autotools # for msys

Since some projects depend on specific versions of automake and, in some cases, autoconf, we provide two wrappers which dynamically provide different versions using the same script:

automake wrapper

By default the automake wrapper will detect the right version based on existing generated files and things will just work. You can also force a different version via the WANT_AUTOMAKE env var, and the newest available version via WANT_AUTOMAKE=latest.

WANT_AUTOMAKE='1.15' autoreconf -fvi

autoconf wrapper

By default the autoconf wrapper will detect the right version based on existing generated files and things will just work. You can also force a different version via the WANT_AUTOCONF env var, and the newest available version via WANT_AUTOCONF=latest.

WANT_AUTOCONF='2.69' autoreconf -fvi

These wrappers are developed by Gentoo Linux and are also used in Cygwin.

Known Issues

Some projects require their configure scripts to be updated to make them build successfully:

$ pacman -S "${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-autotools"
$ autoreconf -fvi
$ ./configure
$ make
...

This is due to some MSYS2 specific patches that have not been upstreamed yet or have not made it into upstream projects.