I'm trying to compile a code to run in parallel on a supercomputer. I know that others have compiled this code to run on the same computer, but for some reason I am having trouble even when using the same methodology as them. For now I'm just trying to compile the code to run in serial as that should be easier to troubleshoot.
configure seems to work correctly. However make install returns the following:
> make install
CDPATH="${ZSH_VERSION+.}:" && cd .. && /bin/sh /home1/username123/code123/config/missing aclocal-1.13 -I ./config -I /home1/username123/code123/build-tools/aclocal -I /usr/local/share/aclocal
aclocal-1.13: error: couldn't open directory '/usr/local/share/aclocal': No such file or directory
Makefile:534: recipe for target '../aclocal.m4' failed
make: *** [../aclocal.m4] Error 1
aclocal is indeed not located at /usr/local/share/aclocal, it is located at /usr/bin/aclocal - but as /usr/bin is in my path, I don't understand why the location is an issue.
As has been made clear in comments on the question, the problem was that the project sources were copied onto the target system in a way that failed to preserve their original timestamps. The Autotools, through make, use file timestamps to determine which files are out of date, and in particular, Autools-generated Makefiles contain rules for rebuilding the build system itself that can be triggered this way.
It is not ordinarily necessary or desirable to rebuild an Autotools project's build system, except in conjunction with actually performing maintenance on it. It is often the case, in fact, that the necessary support for that is not available locally. To avoid the build system thinking that it needs to rebuild itself, it is important to preserve the file timestamps from the distribution archive. For some packages, it also works to pass the --disable-maintainer-mode argument to the configure script, but by no means do all Autotools configure scripts support that.
The archive extraction tools for the typical archive formats in which Autotools-based packages are distributed do, by default, preserve timestamps when unpacking, so the ordinary procedure of
tar xzf foo-1.2.3.tar.gz)cd foo-1.2.3)configure; make; make installnormally does the right thing. Substituting something else for (1), however, such as copying the unpacked source tree from somewhere else, may cause the package to think it needs to rebuild the build system. If that works correctly then it's no big deal, but it is not uncommon that it doesn't. That's what happened here, and following the standard procedure described above solved the problem.