perl configuration question

[Nikola Lecic]

On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 20:40:32 -0600
"Andrew Falanga" <af300wsm at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to install WebGUI on a FreeBSD system for my church.
> WebGUI uses PERL for its operation.  The program has a test
> environment perl script that it tries to run to make sure the
> environment can run WebGUI.  On a couple of the perl modules it tries
> to install, it bails saying that "make" is no good.
> 
> I'm guessing this is because perl is expecting GNU make not BSD make,
> and since it's looks for /usr/bin/make, I'm sure it's getting the
> wrong version.  I'm pretty much a perl neophyte, having written only
> one perl script in my life and that was so pitifully little that it
> really wasn't worthy of being called a script; I do not know how to
> fix this.  How does one fix the configuration of perl (if this is even
> the problem, I'm going to try and see if this is something WebGUI is
> trying to use).

Hello Andrew,

This application needs good Porting. Unfortunatelly, many applications
advertise themselves like "Runs on Linux/BSD/Solaris/AIX/....." while
taking zero or close to zero care of anything but Linux. This is
visible in the fact that WebGUI sctipts do no inspection regarding
available make versions and for example in their assuming that bash
surely lives in /bin.

Here are several notes on what you can do:

(1) you have to manually replace all occurences of 'make' with 'gmake',
    at least in build.sh. If the script itself fails, run it manually
    with /usr/local/bin/bash or change bash path(s);

(2) please note that build.sh with no arguments will actually build not
    just Perl, but Apache, ImageMagick, AwStats, several Perl modules,
    MySQL and many other things as well, which doesn't make much sense.
    It seems that you have to run it with

      # /usr/local/bin/bash build.sh --wre

    with all prerequisites (you must gather them by hand from the
    installation scripts) previously installed from ports. But it's very
    likely that the script will not find all it needs itself and that
    you must help it manually. A short inspection shows that you need

       databases/memcached
       graphics/ImageMagick
       databases/mysql...
       www/apache...
       www/awstats
       www/mod_perl
       ftp/lftp

    and many more, including a huge number of Perl modules. Some of
    these apps maybe have to be built with special options.

    Any you still have to take care about paths the scripts use after
    the installation in order to get WebGUI fully working.

(3) Maybe you should consider using another CMS software, there is a
    lot of choice, including Perl-based if you prefer that. The most
    important thing is that they are truly ported, so you have just to
    type 'make install' to get running (and optimised) FreeBSD version.

Nikola Lečić