My environment is Mac OS X Lion, newest macports (version 2.1.2). I followed the README down to each letter but errors were returned. The tools in the newest version of Macports have different requirements than the older ones used to write the README.

I then submitted a question to the linphone mailing list and got an answer. As follow:

Arek,

I've been struggling with this for days. It's mystifying to me that it was so hard to get working. I'm using Mountain Lion, Xcode 4.5, and iOS 6. I wonder if perhaps MacPorts is now installing newer versions of the tools required by the install guide.

At any rate, I just got Linphone fully built earlier today. To fix your 'install-sh' problem, you just need to create an empty file that is required by newer versions of autoconf:
> 'touch submodules/linphone/install-sh

At this point, I was stumped for a very long time by another error: 
> ./configure: line 4543: syntax error near unexpected token `HAVE_MD5SUM,test'
> ./configure: line 4543: `AM_CONDITIONAL(HAVE_MD5SUM,test -n $MD5SUM)'
As it turned out, the problem was again triggered by a line in configure.ac:
> configure.ac:42: error: 'AM_PROG_CC_STDC': this macro is obsolete.

The solution was to edit submodules/linphone/configure.ac and delete the line that says:
AM_PROG_CC_STDC
You will need to 'make veryclean' or run 'cd build/linphone; ./autogen.sh'

Incidentally, while working through this I also figured out the necessary steps to replace MacPorts with brew which has the advantage of being more self-contained and easily reversible than MacPorts.
1) Install brew: (instructions at http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/)
2) Install dependencies:
brew install coreutils automake autoconf libtool intltool 
brew install wget pkgconfig cmake gmake yasm doxygen ImageMagick optipng
brew tap homebrew/dupes
brew install xz homebrew/dupes/grep

Linphone is hardcoded to look for a lot of tools in MacPorts-specific locations, (e.g. /opt/local/bin) so I also had to create a link from there to brew's standard install location: 'ln -s /usr/local /opt/local'

Good luck!
Eli

On Jan 15, 2013, at 12:00 PM, linphone-developers-request@nongnu.org wrote:

> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:08:36 +0800 (SGT)
> From: Firman 
> To: linphone-developers@nongnu.org
> Subject: [Linphone-developers] liblinphone SDK build failed.
> Message-ID:
>     <1358237316.44153.YahooMailClassic@web193306.mail.sg3.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> Hi everybody,
> I have sifted through the mailing list archives but have not found anyone posting the same build failure problem as mine.
> 
> So I cloned the git repo for iPhone
> git clone 
> git://git.linphone.org/linphone-iphone.git?--recursive
> 
> and then followed everything that the README file says about how to build the liblinphone SDK down to each letter. And then I do
> 
> sudo make all.
> 
> It failed first with the following error:
> 
> Generating configuration files for Speex, please wait....
> ? aclocal 
> configure.ac:5: error: 'AM_CONFIG_HEADER': this macro is obsolete.
> ??? You should use the 'AC_CONFIG_HEADERS' macro instead.
> /opt/local/share/aclocal-1.13/obsolete-err.m4:12: AM_CONFIG_HEADER is expanded from...
> configure.ac:5: the top level
> autom4te: /opt/local/bin/gm4 failed with exit status: 1
> aclocal: error: echo failed with exit status: 1
> make[1]: *** [/Users/barablu/Documents/workspace/liniphone/linphone-iphone/submodules/build/..//externals/speex/configure] Error 1
> make: *** [build] Error 2
> 
> I then changed line 5 of configure.ac in speex directory from 
> AM_CONFIG_HEADER to AC_CONFIG_HEADERS. That error went away but now I get the following error that I have no clue how to solve. Can anybody please help me? I'm using XCode 4.5, iOS SDK 6, Mac OS X Lion. Thank you.
> 
> Best regards,
> Arek Malang
> 
> configure: loading site script /Users/barablu/Documents/workspace/liniphone/linphone-iphone/submodules/build/..//build/iphone-config.site
> Loading config.site for iPhone platform=Simulator version=4.0
> /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator4.3.sdk
> /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator3.2.sdk
> /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator4.0.sdk
> /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator4.1.sdk
> /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator4.2.sdk
> /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator5.0.sdk
> Selecting SDK path = /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator5.0.sdk
> configure: error: cannot find install-sh, install.sh, or shtool in "/Users/barablu/Documents/workspace/liniphone/linphone-iphone/submodules/build/..//linphone" "/Users/barablu/Documents/workspace/liniphone/linphone-iphone/submodules/build/..//linphone/.." "/Users/barablu/Documents/workspace/liniphone/linphone-iphone/submodules/build/..//linphone/../.."
> make[1]: *** [/Users/barablu/Documents/workspace/liniphone/linphone-iphone/submodules/build/../build-i386-apple-darwin/linphone/Makefile] Error 1
> make: *** [build] Error 2