trouble installing
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#5 trouble installing
I'm trying to install Xournal on a Mac w/ OS 10.4.8. Running ./autogen.sh produces some output, including the last two lines
./configure: line 4199: syntax error near unexpected token `PACKAGE,'
./configure: line 4199: `PKG_CHECK_MODULES(PACKAGE, $pkg_modules)'
Next I type "make" and get
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.
Any suggestions?
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Is pkg-config installed on your system? (in particular you should have somewhere a file called pkg.m4 in a directory containing scripts for aclocal). I think your error is caused by aclocal failing to process the PKG_CHECK_MODULES directive in configure.in (normally configure should not contain this line - aclocal should have taken care of replacing it by a sequence of commands to run).
In general, you'll need GTK+-2 and libgnomecanvas, and various other libraries, in order to be able to build xournal. I'm not sure about the status of all these libraries (I'm not familiar with MacOS) - but I guess it would be good to figure out how to build Xournal on MacOS, since I've heard that a Mac tablet is going to appear soon.
Denis.
I have pull-requested a fix that makes sense to me, which is one line in configuration.ac, to abort the autogen.sh if the offending macro is undefined. Does it make sense to you-all?
https://github.com/xournal/xournal/pull/5
This does make some sense, but given that autogen.sh already aborts
anyway because things can't complete further, the only benefit is a
slightly clearer error message. I am not sure how helpful that will be,
though, or how often people run into this problem these days.
Denis
Hi Denis,
Thanks for getting back to me. I have a few responses, with the last one first.
Most people won't develop Xournal, so they will never run into this problem. Of the people who run some linux distribution and do, everyone will run into it, whose distribution does not come with pkgconfig or the correct replacement; ie everyone who's running a distribution which was initially intended for desktop users, and they are now able, at least in principle, to expand it into a software development platform.
The other is that autogen.sh completes, and the error is downstream in configure. I think that I'm taking the view that development tools should (RFC 2119) produce syntactic output.
My personal itch, that I'm trying to get to, is bug 205, because I have been filling in (ie scribbling text over) pdf forms for someone, and that bug makes it finicky. I basically know what code change is required, in start_text() in src/xo_paint.c. On the way, I'm encountering all of the usual developability problems with expanding a desktop platform. If I can have this fix, then I plan also to write and close a bug to document what-all I had to install, for the benefit of the next person who makes the same journey.
Does this seem like a sensible (if a bit pedantic) approach to the world?
Regards,
James.
Hi James,
All right... but still, I think your distribution's packaging is
somewhat broken. For example, in Fedora, the gtk2-devel package
containing the header files for compiling GTK2 applications requires as
dependencies all the other packages needed to compile GTK2 applications,
including pkgconfig. Same in Ubuntu. My impression is that most major
distributions do this, making it much easier to develop software on a
system that was initially set up purely as a desktop, so the problem you
encountered is quite rare nowadays.
Denis
Done (on the sourceforge.net repository, which is the only one I'm
involved with, and with a slightly different error message).
Denis
Thank you, Denis.
I've adjusted my message most of the way toward yours:
https://github.com/JamesC1/xournal-01/commit/e2eb38b3257d3e8f7c6d2df57b8fe4610999d4f9
The apostrophe breaks vim syntax highlighting, so I've expanded doesn't.
I don't know whether gtk2-devel implies pkgconfig in my packaging. I have not yet got around to installing it.
Your Xournal is very different from the one that I started with. This change:
https://github.com/xournal/xournal/commit/3e59ba847964d7648ac8df58aed1f64f0150dd7b
removed the checking from autogen.sh. If I had started with yours, then I might have put the check into the shell script.
Do you have a sense either of how many other differences I should expect or who I would need to engage with, to get the change into the github version?
James.
I don't have a great sense of how many differences there are between the
github repository and that on sourceforge. I think Daniel German
(dmgerman on github) is or at least was the maintainer of the github
repository, and that the main divergence has been including various
cleaning up / infrastructure upgrade patches of the sort you proposed
that I've been too lazy and unresponsive to deal with. My impression is
that the actual code is fairly similar, but I don't know whether all of
my bugfixes have been included, nor what additional feature suggestions
might have been merged into the github repository. I think the intent is
that the actual code remains pretty much the same despite the divergent
autoconf stuff.
Denis