c++ - How to overcome "'aclocal-1.15' is missing on your system" warning?

Question

Im trying to run a c++ program on github. (available at the following link https://github.com/mortehu/text-classifier)

I have a mac, and am trying to run it in the terminal. I think I have downloaded autoconf and automake but am not sure. To run the program I am going to the correct folder in terminal then running

./configure && make 

But I get the error:

WARNING: 'aclocal-1.15' is missing on your system. You should only need it if you modified 'acinclude.m4' or 'configure.ac' or m4 files included by 'configure.ac'. The 'aclocal' program is part of the GNU Automake package: http://www.gnu.org/software/automake It also requires GNU Autoconf, GNU m4 and Perl in order to run: http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf http://www.gnu.org/software/m4/ http://www.perl.org/ make: *** [aclocal.m4] Error 127

I have xcode and g++ and all the things required to run c programs, but as is probably obvious, I have no idea what Im doing.

What is the easiest, simplest way to run the program in the above link? I realise it comes with a readme and example usage but I can not get that to work.

Answer 1

Before running ./configure try running autoreconf -f -i. The autoreconf program automatically runs autoheader, aclocal, automake, autopoint and libtoolize as required.

Edit to add: This is usually caused by checking out code from Git instead of extracting it from a .zip or .tar.gz archive. In order to trigger rebuilds when files change, Git does not preserve files' timestamps, so the configure script might appear to be out of date. As others have mentioned, there are ways to get around this if you don't have a sufficiently recent version of autoreconf.

Another edit: This error can also be caused by copying the source folder extracted from an archive with scp to another machine. The timestamps can be updated, suggesting that a rebuild is necessary. To avoid this, copy the archive and extract it in place.