Thursday, March 10, 2011

Building Guile 2.0 on the Mac

Introduction

Guile 2.0 was just released in February so neither Fink nor MacPorts have support for it yet. There's no reason to wait, though. It's easy to build Guile from the source distribution. The only problem is that Mac OS X is missing several of the libraries that Guile needs, so they must be compiled and installed first.

In the step-by-step directions below, I have you rerun configure after each step rather than trying to compile and install all the libraries first. That's because your system may have fewer or more missing libraries than mine and rerunning configure will tell you what you need to do next.

Note that you'll need to be root or use sudo when running make install.

Step-by-step instructions

  1. Go to the Gnu Guile Web site and download the latest stable release (2.0.0 as of this writing).
  2. Untar the source into the directory where Guile will live, change into that directory and run configure. Unless you have a current Gnu multiple precision library installed, configure will return an error saying: 
    Gnu MP 4.1 or greater not found, see README
  3. If you don't get this error, you already have Gnu MP installed; go on to step 4.

    a. Otherwise, retrieve Gnu MP from the GMP Web site. I used the latest stable release, GMP 4.3.2 but there is also a “performance release,” GMP 5.0.1.

    b. Run configure with the build option: 

    ./configure --build=x86_64-apple-darwin10

    If you don't specify the build option, the MP library will be built for a generic x86 system and the Guile configure script will fail again with the same error. If x86_64-apple-darwin10 does not describe your system, check the Guile config.log file to see what it's expecting.

    c. Run make check. This will exercise the library and make sure everything was built correctly.

    d. Run make install

  4. Change back to the Guile directory and rerun configure. The next error will tell you the next missing library. I got 
    configure: error: GNU libunistring is required, please install it.

    a. Retrieve libunistring from the libunistring Web site and untar it into a working directory.

    b. Do the usual configure / make / make install dance to make and install the library.

  5. Return to the Guile directory and rerun configure. This time configure will complain about a missing pkg-config script. If you don't get this error go on to step 6.

    a. Retrieve pkg-script from the pkg-config Wiki.

    b. Untar it into a working directory and run configure / make / make install.

  6. Return to the Guile directory and rerun configure. This time configure will complain about a missing libffi. If you did not get this error, go on to step 7.

    a. Retrieve the library from the libffi Web site.

    b. Untar the library into a working directory and run configure / make / make install.

  7. Return to the Guile directory and rerun configure. The configure script will complain about a missing BDW-gc library.

    a. Go to http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/gc_source/ and down load the source for Version 7.1. Note that the stable version does not compile on the Mac.

    b. Untar the source into a working directory and do the usual configure / make / make check / make install. At some point (either during the make or the make check you might get an error complaining that the ucontext routines are deprecated and that you need to specify _XOPEN_SOURCE. I did this by editing the source for mach_dep.c and including the statement 

    #define _XOPEN_SOURCE

    right before the 

    #include <ucontext.h>
  8. Return to the Guile directory and rerun configure. This time configure should finish normally and you can try compiling Guile. If you get an error about the missing symbol _rl_get_keymap_name, you will need to go to the readline library Web page and get the latest version of the library. Before you build the library, delete or rename the libreadline that is in /usr/lib. That version of the library is the BSD version supplied by Apple and is no longer compatible. Then build and install the new libreadline with the usual configure / make / make install. Return to the Guile directory and run make clean. Then rerun the make. If you don't run the make clean Guile may sigfault when you try to run it. Check out your build by running make check and then do the make install. At this point you should have a working version of Guile 2.0.
Posted by at
Labels:

6 comments:

  1. AnonymousJune 26, 2011 at 7:41 PM

    Very helpful and intuitively written article. I was installing MEEP (for simulation in physics) on my Mac.

    As a precursor to that I needed to install guile.I did got the error message as in step 2(Gnu MP 4.1 or greater not found, see README).
    I installed gmp 5.0.2,with configure/make check/ install, I also specified the build, but instead of error of missing library I again got same error message" Gnu MP 4.1 or ..........README"

    Whats wrong, any clues???

    ReplyDelete
  2. jcsJune 27, 2011 at 6:24 AM

    I used 4.3.2 and was able to get it to compile after messing with the build variable. Try 4.3.2 and see if that works. If not you will have to look at config.log to see what build string it is actually expecting. That may depend on how old your Mac is for example.

    By now, there may be Guile packages on Fink, Homebrew, or MacPorts if you can't get Gnu MP to install.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJune 28, 2011 at 4:28 AM

    I installed guile and gmp from mac ports, pretty easy!!
    kiittos! thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownFebruary 11, 2012 at 7:08 PM

    Thanks for the hint about the obsolete readline. I was just about to start banging my head on the keyboard... However I didn't remove the old library, just in case, but exported new LDFLAGS before configuring and making guile.

    ReplyDelete
  5. zenGatorAugust 21, 2013 at 8:53 PM

    The steps provided were very helpful, but I ran into three additional issues installing Guile v2.0.9 on my Mac OS X (uname ==> Darwin Kernel Version 12.4.0: Wed May 1 17:57:12 PDT 2013; root:xnu-2050.24.15~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64)

    (1) I wound up needing to rebuild libiconv-1.14 (http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libiconv/)

    (2) I used gc-7.3alpha2 (which asked for libatomic_ops-7.3alpha2) instead of version 7.1.

    (3) A number of the scripts in guile-2.0.9/build-aux have a boogered-up she-bang line. Something akin to:
    #!/nix/store/ryk1ywzz31kp4biclxq3yq6hpjycalyy-bash-4.2/bin/sh
    instead of:
    #!/bin/sh

    This caused a failure to build that manifested with:
    MacOShost:guile-2.0.9 user$ make
    make all-recursive
    Making all in lib
    GEN alloca.h
    GEN c++defs.h
    GEN warn-on-use.h
    GEN arg-nonnull.h
    make[2]: ../build-aux/install-sh: Permission denied
    make[2]: *** [arpa/inet.h] Error 1
    make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
    make: *** [all] Error 2

    I fixed this by running this one-liner from within build-aux:
    for fi in * ; do sed 's/^#!\/nix\/store\/.*\/bin\/sh$/#!\/bin\/sh/' "$fi" > zgtmp ; mv zgtmp "$fi"; chmod 744 "$fi" ; done

    After that, guile compiled while I smiled.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. zenGatorAugust 22, 2013 at 5:27 AM

      Doh! Wrong set of errors. Should be:
      $ make
      make all-recursive
      Making all in lib
      GEN alloca.h
      GEN c++defs.h
      GEN warn-on-use.h
      GEN arg-nonnull.h
      make[2]: ../build-aux/install-sh: No such file or directory
      make[2]: *** [arpa/inet.h] Error 1
      make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
      make: *** [all] Error 2

      The "Permission denied" was due to a mistake unique to my system.

      Delete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)