I have been trying to build the freetype2 library in OSX Mavericks for several weeks now, but without success.
The trouble is with using GNU Autotools to create the configure build script.
I have installed automake, autoconf, libtoolize, m4 and perl5 using the macports port command.
When executing aclocal, there is supposed to be a file created in the configure directory that contains Autotools macros: aclocal.m4. However, this file is not being output, and the subsequent glibtoolize and autoconf commands are generating a spurious configure script.
The result is: no aclocal.m4 file, and the usual contents of ./autom4te.cache/traces.* being dumped at the top of the generated configure file (the traces.* files are empty).
e.g.:
m4trace:configure.ac:14: -1- AC_SUBST([SHELL])
m4trace:configure.ac:14: -1- AC_SUBST_TRACE([SHELL])
m4trace:configure.ac:14: -1- m4_pattern_allow([^SHELL$])
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
GNU Autotools does not support execution over a working directory stored on a FAT32 file system. It results in spurious m4trace debug messages being output to the generated configure script.
It is unknown why this is, but may be related to the reliance on the sleep command to check whether a file has changed. FAT32 rounds time stamps to the nearest second, where execution and subsequent modification checks may happen on a sub-second timescale.
This has been raised with the development team, but for now, I move my working directory to my OSX boot partition before executing GNU Autotools.