[Gnuplot-info] gnuplot configure/make issues

[Paul M. <pcm...@ya...>]

I ran into some issues with configuring and compiling gnuplot 4.4.2 on RedHat Linux. 


Here is the output of a 'uname -a' command;

Linux xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.com 2.6.18-128.el5 #1 SMP Wed Dec 17 11:41:38 EST 
2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux


First issue was the need to install the libgd libraries.



Second issue was the 'configure' script was choking during the process 
of detecting the proper parameters for the 'readline' calls. Although it
 was properly detecting which calls were supported, the makefile options
 that it detected were immediately overwritten by a recursive call that 
was testing the readline.h file. 

In particular, the make file option 
-lncurses was overwritten, but any of ncurses curses termcap terminfo or
 termlib types would not have been properly configured in the makefile.



The failure to find the ncurses option/switch resulted in a build error 
with an output like;
/usr/local/lib/libreadline.so: undefined reference to `tgetnum'

/usr/local/lib/libreadline.so: undefined reference to `tgoto'

/usr/local/lib/libreadline.so: undefined reference to `tgetflag'

/usr/local/lib/libreadline.so: undefined reference to `BC'

/usr/local/lib/libreadline.so: undefined reference to `tputs'

/usr/local/lib/libreadline.so: undefined reference to `PC'

/usr/local/lib/libreadline.so: undefined reference to `tgetent'

/usr/local/lib/libreadline.so: undefined reference to `UP'

/usr/local/lib/libreadline.so: undefined reference to `tgetstr'



And, if that weren't enough, subsequent 'configure' tests for libraries 
such as the compression library 'libz' would fail because of the 
previous failure to properly configure the readline libraries.



My workaround was to hard-code the '-lncurses' switch into the configure
 script after its test for readline.h.



Third issue was  the configure script's call into the libgd script, 
gdlib-config --libs, that provides the compile options. The gdlib-config
 includes a macro @LIBICONV@, intended to point to the double-byte 
language conversion libraries. That definition of that macro does not 
exist in my RedHat linux system, so it gets passed verbatim into the 
configure script, which causes yet another failure. I modified the 
gdlib-config script to remove that macro.



Hope this helps somebody.


Paul