What follows is pure programming geekery. I should probably get a separate blog for this kind of stuff, but for now, non-programmers please move on to another one of our fine sections.
I’ve spent some time tonight installing Redland on Mac OS X 10.4.8, by following the documentation at their site. Their straightforward instructions worked perfectly on CentOs 4.4, but it took a bit more to get it running on OS X. Here are a few pointers that might be useful for those attempting to do it.
- You’re defnitely going to need Xcode and the included Apple Developer Tools, so let’s start by getting it.
- Fink is your friend.
- It’s very possible you’ll need to upgrade automake, autoconf and gtk-doc. The ones included with OS X are old, but Fink can help you with that.
fink install automake autoconf gtk-doc
Once you’ve updated them, quit and reload your terminal application - at some point I had two open terminals reporting different versions of automake.
- Redland requires flex version 2.5.19. You’re likely to have only version 2.5.4a, which the Sourceforge page states is from 1997, so just download the latest version manually and install yourself. You’ll probably need to remove the old flex from /usr/bin as well as /sw/bin
- You may get a cryptic error stating:
checking for bison... bison -y
checking for GNU bison... configure: error: bison -y is not GNU bison
See `config.log' for more details.
In order to fix this, you’ll have to edit rasqal/configure.ac. Look for the line:
YACC_VERSION=`$YACC --version 2>&1 | sed -ne 's/^.*GNU Bison. //p'`
and replace it with
YACC_VERSION=`$YACC --version 2>&1 | sed -ne 's/^.*GNU Bison //p'`
Yup. Just removing that period fixes the problem.
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If you get errors like:
src/Makefile.am:27: Libtool library used but `LIBTOOL' is undefined
src/Makefile.am:27:
src/Makefile.am:27: The usual way to define `LIBTOOL' is to add `AC_PROG_LIBTOOL'
src/Makefile.am:27: to `configure.ac' and run `aclocal' and `autoconf' again.
That means that libtool isn’t using the same prefix as automake. You can fix this problem by getting its macro files from fink.
fink install libtool14 libtool14-shlibs
If you’re attempting to install the Redland Bindings, you’re going to need SWIG as well. As of today Fink has only version 1.3.20 and the Redland bindings require version 1.3.24, so you’re going to have to install form source.
Before you download it, make sure you fill in the survey - you want to let them know somebody is developing on OS X.
I hope these tips save you some time. Drop me a note if there’s any guidance I can offer.