How to disallow different automake versions from overwriting each other's binary files

Question

I was using automake 1.11 without trouble, until some package required automake 1.10. When installing it, I found that it actually wants to overwrite /usr/bin/{aclocal,automake} (which were installed by 1.11).

Here's my ./configure command:

./configure --prefix=/usr

I would prefer the solution to involve the build files, as opposed to modifying the filesystem directly.

Answer 1

You could install the old automake version into a different folder, such as:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/automake-1.10

Then when you want to use that version, make sure it gets picked up before the real/latest version:

export PATH=/usr/local/automake-1.10/bin:$PATH
automake --version

It doesn't have to go into /usr/local/automake-1.10 either, you can put it in your home directory so you don't need root access to install it, and it can be easily removed when you're done.

Answer 2

You shouldn't need to do anything. Automake by default installs everything with a version suffix. Whatever you installed last would be automake, but you can call automake-1.10 and automake-1.11 directly.