In regard to: War story: installing gnucash 1.2.3 on stock redhat 6.0,...:
>I wanted to install as much of the necessary software as possible in
>rpm format, to make it easier to remove or upgrade it later. This
>proved to be quite a challenge. Much of the software required didn't
>have rpms or source rpms of the later versions. Often, even finding
>the software in the first place was a bit of a challenge. Sometimes,
>I was able to find an older rev of the software in src.rpm format, and
>use the old spec file (edited) with the new package.
We're using RPM to manage local software on all our platforms (not just Linux),
so if you think it's a challenge to build gnucash and prereqs with RPM and
gcc/egcs on Linux, try building it all using the vendor compiler on some other
platform. :-|
GnuCash itself wasn't too bad, but some of the prereqs were a nightmare.
XmHTML was especially bad.
>Working with source rpms was an especial pain since any time a
>compilation failed due to missing dependencies, etc, rpm restarted the
>entire process over from scratch. The "--short-circuit" option of rpm
>doesn't really help all that much. Is there a way to tell rpm to
>"continue from this stage until the end ?"
You mean skip the %prep and the configure part of %build and go right
back at the make? You can, but it's a hack. Just *temporarily* modify the
spec file so that the first line of the %prep section is
exit 0
and then comment out the configure call (and anything else that shouldn't
be done *again*) in %build, and have it start right in with the make.
> Especially, is there a way
>to put the configure and the make commands in different stages ?
You can put `make' whereever you want. It makes the most sense to have it
in %build, but it could easily go in %install if you wanted.
> I'd
>like to be able to restart a make instead of redoing a configure,
>which restarts the make from the beginning, and doesn't really make
>for a clean compile, either, without a make clean.
Comment out the call to configure.
>Several of these packages, specifically swig, nana, slib, and libtool
>are _not_ mentioned in the requirements section of the README file.
>Can this information please be put there ?
They are mentioned in the README I looked at. The `official ftp site' for
some of the packages should probably be updated (or added, in the case of
slib), but for the most part I was pleased with the documenation AFA prereqs.
It's clear to me that a lot of work has been done in an effort to make GnuCash
as friendly to all Unixes as other GNU packages are. It's not quite there yet,
but it's heading in the right direction. Testing, constructive feedback,
and patches for dicey areas are all that's needed to get GnuCash to that point.
I have successfully built gnucash 1.2.3 and all prereqs on my
alpha-dec-osf4.0f workstation using Compaq's C compiler, and I hope to be
submitting some small patches that should help portability some in the next
few weeks. Perhaps you could supply the authors with a patch to the README
that updates the prereqs and includes canonical URLs for the software?
Tim
--
Tim Mooney [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Information Technology Services (701) 231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J1, IACC Building (701) 231-8541 (Fax)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164
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