Basic UNIX configure/make/sudo make install question - macos

Question

I have learned to compile my own source over the years but always left some of the process to "mystery". I'm running into a bitch of a time getting ImageMagick and its myriad dependencies to work correctly on a PowerPC Mac OS X Server.
In setting flags for ./compile where does one typically uncover the various options (flags) that can be set and the descriptions of what each does?!?
For example, in the case of libwmf I'm using:
./configure --without-expat --with-xml --with-png=/usr/X11
...but not really knowing what each flag does. Now I'm having a png compatibility problem and want to find out why --with-png=/usr/X11 flag is being specified in install script I'm following...but can't find any documentation, etc. Any help?
Even a general response of how the UNIX Guru approaches this problem would be helpful.

Answer 1

./configure --help will give you the list of options that a configure script supports. To find out details about each option or the arguments you have to supply in particular cases, you will have to read the installation documentation of the particular package, if it has one. There are certain conventions that you will pick up over time, but they are just conventions. If you build a rather complicated package such as ImageMagick that pulls in dozens of library dependencies, and you use a less-than-common platform such as Mac with hand-compiled stuff, you might really have to dig deep and hard in some cases.

Answer 2

On my Mac, /usr/X11/lib contains a lot of libraries, including libpng.dylib and libpng.3.44.0.dylib in particular. Do you have those libraries? If not, you need to get X11 installed onto your Mac, and things are likely to go more smoothly.
MacOS X for Intel
I've downloaded ImageMagick 6.6.9-9 and configured, built and checked (but not installed) it with minimal issues. I have XCode 4 on my machine - and the only special option I used with ./configure was:
CC=/usr/bin/gcc ./configure
to ensure it picked up the system-provided GCC (4.2.1), not my private version of GCC 4.6.0. (A configuration test failed - for the sizeof(off_t) - because of a library issue. Using the system C compiler avoided that problem.) The ImageMagick configuration printed out:
ImageMagick is configured as follows. Please verify that this configuration
matches your expectations.
Host system type: x86_64-apple-darwin10.7.0
Build system type: x86_64-apple-darwin10.7.0
Option Value
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shared libraries --enable-shared=yes yes
Static libraries --enable-static=yes yes
Module support --with-modules=no no
GNU ld --with-gnu-ld=no no
Quantum depth --with-quantum-depth=16 16
High Dynamic Range Imagery
--enable-hdri=no no
Delegate Configuration:
BZLIB --with-bzlib=yes yes
Autotrace --with-autotrace=no no
Dejavu fonts --with-dejavu-font-dir=default none
DJVU --with-djvu=yes no
DPS --with-dps=yes no
FFTW --with-fftw=yes no
FlashPIX --with-fpx=yes no
FontConfig --with-fontconfig=yes no
FreeType --with-freetype=yes yes
GhostPCL None pcl6 (unknown)
GhostXPS None gxps (unknown)
Ghostscript None gs (unknown)
Ghostscript fonts --with-gs-font-dir=default none
Ghostscript lib --with-gslib=no no
Graphviz --with-gvc=yes no
JBIG --with-jbig=yes no
JPEG v1 --with-jpeg=yes no (failed tests)
JPEG-2000 --with-jp2=yes no
LCMS v1 --with-lcms=yes no
LCMS v2 --with-lcms2=yes no
LQR --with-lqr=yes no
LZMA --with-lzma=yes no
Magick++ --with-magick-plus-plus=yes yes
OpenEXR --with-openexr=yes no
PERL --with-perl=no no
PNG --with-png=yes yes
RSVG --with-rsvg=yes no
TIFF --with-tiff=yes no
WEBP --with-webp=yes no
Windows fonts --with-windows-font-dir= none
WMF --with-wmf=yes no
X11 --with-x= yes
XML --with-xml=yes yes
ZLIB --with-zlib=yes yes
X11 Configuration:
X_CFLAGS =
X_PRE_LIBS = -lSM -lICE
X_LIBS = -L/usr/X11/lib -R/usr/X11/lib
X_EXTRA_LIBS =
Options used to compile and link:
PREFIX = /usr/local
EXEC-PREFIX = /usr/local
VERSION = 6.6.9
CC = /usr/bin/gcc -std=gnu99 -std=gnu99
CFLAGS = -D_THREAD_SAFE -D_THREAD_SAFE -pthread -fopenmp -g -O2 -Wall -D_THREAD_SAFE -pthread
CPPFLAGS = -I/usr/local/include/ImageMagick
PCFLAGS = -fopenmp
DEFS = -DHAVE_CONFIG_H
LDFLAGS = -L/usr/X11/lib -R/usr/X11/lib
MAGICK_LDFLAGS = -L/usr/local/lib -L/usr/X11/lib -R/usr/X11/lib
LIBS = -lMagickCore -lfreetype -lpng -lXext -lXt -lSM -lICE -lX11 -lbz2 -lxml2 -lz -lm -lgomp -lclparser -Wl,-framework,OpenCL -L/System/Library/Frameworks/OpenCL.framework/Versions/A/Libraries -lm -lpthread
CXX = g++
CXXFLAGS = -g -O2 -D_THREAD_SAFE -pthread
FEATURES = OpenMP
Some of the tests failed - I expect that was because I was not actually running an X11 server on the machine at the time. I'm not immediately going to investigate - you are running into problems at a much earlier stage.
MacOS X for PowerPC
As you can see, this is for Snow Leopard (10.6.7) on Intel x86/64. If you are running with Leopard (10.5.x) on PowerPC, you probably have an older XCode and libraries etc, but it would be surprising if the configuration process does not work if you have the XCode on the machine - and X11 installed.

Answer 3

Addressing your question about the flags in the invocation:
./configure --without-expat --with-xml --with-png=/usr/X11
In general, you cannot be certain what each flag does because the
maintainer of the package is completely free to have the flags do whatever
they want. There are certain conventions, but many are not well
understood by the package maintainers so you cannot fully rely on them.
Generally, the --with and --without are simply used to determine
what features to compile in. For example, if you do not have libexpat
installed, you can set --without-expat to complete the build which would otherwise fail.
One would suspect that the default for the package is to attempt
to build with certain features that require libexpat, and the
configury will fail if libexpat is not present, so you set
--without-expat to turn off those features.
The --with-png option with an argument is, IMO, a completely
untrustworthy kludge. I've never seen a package where it
actually works. Typically, all the configure script does
is take your /usr/X11 argument and add it (with "-L"
prepended) to LDFLAGS. The idea is that this will cause
the linker to use /usr/X11/libpng.so and not some other
version of libpng, but the simple fact is that if you
have libpng somewhere else on your system and that other
location is in your LDFLAGS, it will be used. In other
words, if you have /usr/lib/foo.so and /usr/lib/bar.so
and /usr/other/lib/foo.so and /usr/other/lib/bar.so,
there is simply no way to use /usr/lib/foo.so and /usr/lib/other/bar.so
short of deleting one of the libraries. Rather than specifying
a path as an argument to --with-png, you are probably better
off doing "--with-png LDFLAGS='-L/path -L/path2'", or just
ensure that your system is built so that the desired paths are
searched by the linker. (eg, specify the paths in /etc/ld.so.conf
or in /etc/ld.so.conf.d)