Okay my question is fairly general so I don't necessarily need help with the programs in reference (though any advice is appreciated!) I'm just trying to get a better understanding of how compiling software from source works and how I can diagnose make errors on my own rather than having to scour the net or ask others for help. So anyways here it is.

I was recently looking for an rss newsreader application and tried a few. At first I settled on RSSowl but even though the slackbuild built and installed (even though a few of the dependencies failed to build, I found binary packages for them on the net) it would not work with errors that listed the lack of multiple dependencies that I later installed and still received errors after meeting them. So even though I would have normally attempted to figure out the problem I scraped it, uninstalled all the dependencies and chose instead to go with liferea.

Now liferea installed and built just fine and seems to working okay with the exception of pages that use flash. I have flash installed it works fine in ff. To get flash to work in liferea you need xulrunner. I cannot get the slackbuild of xulrunner to work, it wont build, yes i have installed all deps and optional deps. But looking at the slackbuild it was quite old so I decided to download the latest source to build against the version of ff i have installed (i.e. ff 24). This also fails during the make process. I'm running a Slackware 14.1 multi-lib system. Can anyone grant some insight into how to properly diagnose make failures in modern Linux for a non-programmer?

bump

This is not IRC. NO need at all to bump a post already after 20 minutes! Go have something to drink.

Just so you know: a) posts that contain "bump" and no other information are explicitly against the rules, b) threads with no replies are automatically bumped twice, and c) your post would be a lot easier to read if it were in shorter paragraphs.

sorry Eric and dugan. Won't happen again. Also Dugan I edited the post accordingly.

Hint, if you are not so versed in compiling from source, try to find SlackBuild scripts.
The slackbuilds.org website has lots of them, and you can use the sbopkg tool to make the process a whole lot easier. Sbopkg knows the concept of building queues (of packages): http://sbopkg.org/queues.php . Basically, a queue is a recipe to build all requirements for the package first, and then the package itself, in the proper order. That page contains a link to a git repository which contains build queue files for every package on slackbuilds.org.
Download that whole git repository of queue files and you'll be able to compile most if not all of slackbuilds.org entries with a few clicks.

Interactive discussion can be had in the #slackbuilds channel on the FreeNode IRC network. A forum just is not that interactive. Be patient and hope that people come up with good advice.

Eric

---------- Post added 18th Jan 2014 at 00:06 ----------

Hint, if you are not so versed in compiling from source, try to find SlackBuild scripts.
The slackbuilds.org website has lots of them, and you can use the sbopkg tool to make the process a whole lot easier. Sbopkg knows the concept of building queues (of packages): http://sbopkg.org/queues.php . Basically, a queue is a recipe to build all requirements for the package first, and then the package itself, in the proper order. That page contains a link to a git repository which contains build queue files for every package on slackbuilds.org.
Download that whole git repository of queue files and you'll be able to compile most if not all of slackbuilds.org entries with a few clicks.

Interactive discussion can be had in the #slackbuilds channel on the FreeNode IRC network. A forum just is not that interactive. Be patient and hope that people come up with good advice.

Eric

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for your response Eric, I appreciate you taking the time to answer my question, and the all of the work that you've done to make Slackware "more usable" for many people, including "noobs" like myself.

However, I don't use a package manager on purpose. If wanted one click access for installing a program I would probably just use a distribution like debian, ubuntu, redhat, fedora, or even pcbsd. I like the idea of compiling from source, as it is traditional, and using slackbuilds allows me to maintain my own package repository for future installs and upgrades.

Also some slackbuild packages are not working properly. I plan to email the person maintaining the packages I'm having problems with shortly to notify them of the problems I have had in an attempt to contribute to the slackbuilds project and/or solve my own problems with those packages.

With that said, my real question is how does one become more adept at compiling their own packages from source, and does anyone have a resource or guide that highlights ways to diagnose the process when it fails? I will definitely be connecting to the the slackbuilds IRC channel to ask for help from now on, but for future reference, I want to become better with source compilation.

Can a non-programmer do this without understanding the languages the program was written in? Or would it be a good idea to start learning some programming?

Hi, this is very basic, but helpful. Not sure if that's what you had in mind?
http://www.slackwiki.com/Compiling
http://www.slackwiki.com/Building_A_Package

Hope it helps ;-)

Thank you MannyNix that was helpful, but I guess i'll just search the web for more stuff on debugging make errors, thanks everyone.

Okay well I'm going to mark this as solved because I did find some answers "out there". Particularly on the Mozilla developer website for compiling their software from source. For anyone who reads this for reference in a similar situation I guess you are not supposed to build new versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, and XULRunner with the traditional ./configure, make, make install.

Instead you are to use "make -j10 -f client.mk" skipping ./configure all together, and that was why XULRunner 26 wouldn't build for me. Still haven't figured out how to get the package installed after compilation, though it did seem to also build a Firefox nightly build (32 bit version 26) that I managed to replace my browser with!

Jokes aside, I like the 32 bit nightly build better, its faster and takes less ram, and it supports all the plugins I had in 64bit. So all is not in vein! But if anybody knows how to install XULRunner after compiling it from the latest source from Mozilla, please let me know because I have followed the instructions online and I have failed miserably.

Greetings and thanks for the thread. I too prefer building from source and sorely miss "checkinstall". Guess I'm going to have to read up on making SlackBuilds.

Incidentally, was the mozilla project by chance the mplayer-plugin mess?

I prefer to use the package management system that comes with Slackware: pkgtool.
If and when I want to compile stuff I will use the slackbuild scripts provided by the good people at slackbuilds.org.
For pre-built binary packages I will install packages from trusted sources only. I like the packages created by Robby and Eric, our Slackware developers.

http://rlworkman.net/pkgs/

http://www.slackware.com/~alien/

The problem with compiling from source (without using slackbuild scripts and the created packages) is that it can on occasion be a PITA to remove unwanted compiled programs. That is, the programs can install themselves to weird, non-standard slackware locations. Just my two cents worth.

That can only happen if you rely on a simple "make install" and possibly if you didn't set $PREFIX. That's why I miss "checkinstall". It would quickly build a Slackware Slackpack.tgz and then we could just use "pkgtool" which also has the benefit of being trackable and uninstallable.

Great Goo, nobody has mentioned the excellent src2pkg program? If there isn't a slackbuild, src2pkg is the way to go.

3 members found this post helpful.

Yeah, forgot gnashley's amazing utility.

http://distro.ibiblio.org/amigolinux/download/src2pkg/