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.