Re: Problems building Maildrop on a Macintosh

> On Dec 1, 2018, at 8:24 AM, Sam Varshavchik <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Larry Stone writes:
> 
>> 
>> Which now takes me to Maildrop 3.0.0 which adds the need for libidn. Even though libidn is in /usr/local/lib and I’m configuring with:
>> ./configure --enable-utf CPPFLAGS='-I/usr/local/include' LDFLAGS='-L/usr/local/lib’
>> I get
>> checking for LIBIDN... no
>> configure: error: libidn not found
>> 
> 
> libidn uses pkg-config.
> 
> https://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/manual/libidn.html#Building-the-source
> 
> What happens when you try to execute
> 
> pkg-config libidn --cflags
> 
> Maybe your pkg-config tool is installed in /usr/local/sbin, and it's not in your PATH. Add it, and try again.

Or maybe I didn’t have and had never heard of pkg-config. configure reported in the log that it couldn’t find pkg-config but errored on libidn rather than throwing an error on the lack of pkg-config.

Once I installed pkg-config, everything worked fine other than maildrop 3.0.0 then reporting that it needed Courier Unicode 2.1 (I had 1.1). Installed that and everything made and worked without any additional flags beyond the "CPPFLAGS='-I/usr/local/include' LDFLAGS='-L/usr/local/lib’” we discussed last night.

Not to complain (too much) about free software, with so many packages where “./configure; make; make install” just works, Maildrop was a little but frustrating. For us system admin types (hard-core coding is 25+ years in my past), compiler and linker flags are not obvious (particularly since my hard-core coding was on VMS, not Unix). My experience is most packages do look in /usr/local for dependencies so I was not expecting that maildrop needs to be explicitly told to do so. Considering how many posts in other forums I found about the PCRE not found issue (but without good solutions), it seems to be a common problem - perhaps a hint in INSTALL or in configure about using those flags to point to where PCRE can be found? Similarly, the libidn package (which I know is not you) could have errored on the lack of pkg-config or reported it as a dependency.

Building these in the MacOS environment can be frustrating. Apple used to provide a lot of things in /usr that with a new MacOS version will go away without notice (Apple really has no interest in supporting doing things in the shell). I’ve tried to get to an environment where everything needed is in /usr/local. It’s not clear to me why /usr/local/include/pcre.h was found by maildrop in MacOS 10.9 without CPPFLAGS but not in 10.13 or 10.14.

Anyway, thanks for the assistance. It is appreciated, all is well now, and I learned some new things for next time (duly noted in my configuration notes).

-- 
Larry Stone
[email protected]







_______________________________________________
Courier-maildrop mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-maildrop