[sword-devel] autotools help (needs zlib-devel RPM package)

[Jonathan Marsden]

Matthew Talbert wrote:

> Your message got posted.

Yes.  I retried after posting it here, while I had the content in my
paste buffer... and the forums were back from being "down for
maintenance" -- pretty quick maintenance, it must have been :)

> I'm guessing he doesn't have sudo.

OK.  It is installed on both crosswire.org and on my Fedora 10 VM
here... but if he really doesn't have it, he can figure out from the
comment what to use instead (su -c or whatever he prefers) do, if he is
someone capable of using a source tarball, I would hope :)

> And shouldn't configure be checking for zlib? I'm almost sure it
> checks somewhere, but I think it doesn't abort the configure if it
> fails.

Agreed 100%, but that won't help him right now.  The SWORD configure
script seems to be very lenient about missing required (or
almost-required?) stuff.  I noticed that some months back, but decided
to just live with it, because I thought if I mentioned it, someone would
probably suggest that I fix it :)

> He's been using usrinst.sh

His forum post describing the issue reads: "The ./configure command went
just fine, ..." which sure doesn't read as though he was running
./usrinst.sh to me.  Perhaps I misunderstood.

> I don't think this explains why sword allows to configure successfully
> in the case of missing zlib.

Agreed again.  But was he (or were you) really looking for an
explanation of potential bugs in SWORD's configure script, or did he
just want to successfully build SWORD on his local machine?  I assumed
the latter, and provided a possible solution that, as far as I can tell,
should work for him.  The subsequent meta-discussion about how to avoid
this kind of issue in future should probably wait until he has actually
successfully compiled and installed SWORD :)

FWIW, I'm installing a Fedora 11 VM right now, doing a minimal install
with no optional package sets selected, and I'll go through what I need
to do to reach the point where I can compile and install SWORD, and
document the result.  This kind of info should probably be in the
INSTALL file and/or on the Crosswire wiki, for both RPM-based and .deb
based Linuxes, incidentally, ready for beginning SWORD
developers/compilers to find and use.  At least until we have fairly
current .deb *amd* RPM packages of SWORD available :)

Jonathan