Avahi compilation help needed

[Roland Smith]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 10:39:27PM +0800, Sagara Wijetunga wrote:
> Dimitry Andric wrote:
> > On 2009-09-10 14:06, Sagara Wijetunga wrote:
> >   
> >> I'm trying to compile Avahi-0.6.25 (http://avahi.org/) on FreeBSD 7.2 
> >> (i386) [in fact, on Tomahawk Desktop]. It develops compilation errors. 
> >>     
> >
> > Any reason why you don't use the net/avahi port instead?  This will save
> > you most compilation and installation headaches.  

My thoughts exactly. 

> Tomahawk Desktop uses FreeBSD sources, it is not based on the FreeBSD
> distribution. 

What does that mean? The FreeBSD sources by default make a complete _base_
distribution.

> It doesn't have a port system. Tomahawk Desktop is designed
> everything to be installed simply by "./configure, [g]make, [g]make install"
> which FreeBSD is not designed to support. 

This is demonstrable not correct. The FreeBSD ports system _does_ use
configure and friends when available in the source of the package. E.g, every
port that has 'GNU_CONFIGURE= yes' in its Makefile uses it. The ports system
is nothing more than a wrapper to allow unmodified sources to be built on
FreeBSD.

> In Tomahawk Desktop, anything you compile and install, can be cleanly
> uninstalled without any file left out, which is not possible in FreeBSD.

Again this is demonstrable false. There are plenty of ports that deinstall
cleanly. One of my own ports, graphics/stl2pov, for example. If what you are
saying were true, it would come as a suprise to many ports developers. Sure,
there are ports with incorrect packing lists which leave files behind, but
usually that is not a big problem. 

And the ports system (correctly, IMO) will not delete files that have been
modified and non-empty directories; a ports system should _never_ delete any of
the users' files.

> Here "compile and install" means you take a package, unpack, make and make
> install, that's it. You don't have wait until somebody prepare a port for
> you.

But you do have to wait until somebody sorts out the compile problems... Which
amount to the same thing. And which can be a royal PITA as you are dicovering.
:-)

IMHO, what you are doing is effectively a huge duplication of effort. I would
advise you to switch over to the ports system and save yourself a lot of
work. If you require applications that are currently not in ports, it is
easier to submit and maintain a few ports than a complete system.

> Coming back to our problem, Avahi get compile errors on FreeBSD when its
> original build system is used. We need a help. Appreciate if somebody could
> give it a try to just compile (ie. download the package, unpack, ./configure
> and gmake).

Avahi needs patches to work properly on FreeBSD. See e.g. the files/ directory
in the net/avahi-app port. Applying those patches should solve most of your
problem.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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