Hi Nick,
long time I haven't used RPMs or SRPMs, so I cannot really help about it.
I am using an SRPM το build RPMs. This SRPM was running fine with earlier versions of dovecot - I don't see any reference of autogen therein.
That there is no "reference of autogen" within the spec we shouldn't really wondering about, maybe because this spec file is normally used together with "release tarballs".
I fetched the nightly snapshot you are using to check the included configure script, to see what version of autoconf was used to generate it.
---------------------------snip-------------------------------------- #! /bin/sh # Guess values for system-dependent variables and create Makefiles. # Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59 for Dovecot 20130326. ---------------------------snip--------------------------------------
As we see the included configure script was generate using autoconf 2.59.
The SRPM is: http://ns.fakessh.eu/rpms/dovecot-2.1.8-1.centme.src.rpm
I've tried building on CentOS 5.9 as well, but it failed with the same error. Again, I did not have such problems when building 2.1.x versions.
Most probably the configure scripts of those version have been generated with an autoconf version > 2.59.
Taking a quick look into the dovecot 2.1.12 sources reveals that the included configure script was generated with autoconf 2.68.
---------------------------snip-------------------------------------- #! /bin/sh # Guess values for system-dependent variables and create Makefiles. # Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.68 for Dovecot 2.1.12. ---------------------------snip--------------------------------------
So I guess we have nailed down the problem ;)
Any other ideas?
I would suggest that you really try to tweak the spec file of that package to regenerate the configure script. I have already seen that there is no autogen.sh shipped within the nightly snapshots, so you might want to try to call 'autorecon -vfi' _before_ calling 'configure'.
Nick
Good Luck, Chris