[mdb-dev] Building mdbtools-0.5 on Solaris 2.9

[Richard A. O'K. <ok...@cs...>]

I want to build mdbtools-0.5 on a SPARC/Solaris 2.9 box.
I'm doing research on some medical data, and some important background
information has just been made available to me, but only as a .mdb file.
(It's no use me asking the supplier for something portable, they're only
a government department and have everything but a clue.)
I have *no* interest in working with this data in Access form,
I just want to get it out as quickly as I can.

I was delighted to find mdbtools, but I have had a rather stressful
and markedly unsuccessful couple of days trying to install it.  (And
I have been installing software from the net onto Unix boxes since
1982 and in particular am reasonably familiar with configure/gmake.)

1.  I only want to build and install the command-line tools.
    Whyever do I need glib for _that_?

2.  I downloaded and installed glib-2.7.7.
    Now this is glib 2 point 7 point 7, and the .pc file that's
    created for it rightly says so.

    BUT glib-2.7.7 installs everything *else* as "2.0", not 2.7.7.

    When I do the configure step for mdbtools, it asks pkg-config,
    and pkg-config says that the version is 2.7.7, but then the
    configure script screeches in horror that glib is *really* 2.0.

    Configure is wrong, glib really *really* is 2.7.7, it's just *called* 2.0.

    i backed out everything I could, reinstalled, and hacked the .pc
    file to say that the version was 2.0.  That didn't work.  I tried
    2.0.0, but *that* didn't work.

3.  When I run gmake check during glib installation, some of the tests
    pass, and some, concerned IIRC with threads, fail.  Since I only
    want to run the command line tools, does this matter at all?

4.  Surprising as it may seem, just because I'm in a Computer Science
    department and have worked as a software developer and teach
    software engineering and want to install this on the machine on my
    desktop, which is not used by anyone else, &c &c, it does *NOT*
    follow that I have root access.  It's University policy that if a
    machine is connected to the campus network, *only* a specially
    approved sysadmin may have root access to it.  A prebuilt binary
    that had to go in /usr/local would be of very little use to me.
    Our sysadmin has created a /users/local/ which I *do* have write
    access to, and if/when I get mdbtools running, that's where the
    stuff will have to go.

So, given that I don't particularly want to install a complete Linux
environment on my Solaris box, and just want to run the command line
tools, how do I install mdbtools-0.5?