First attempt at building!

Since stuff has appeared for download under Sources, I thought I’d try to build some. So here’s a bit of feedback and a question or two.

I basically followed the instructions on the Wiki and in the download README/TXT files.

When attempting to build ROOL.BuildEnv, I was getting errors about not being able to create a directory (sorry, lost the exact message). It appeared that this was caused by my existing perl installation (it sets a Alias$Perl variable). Unsetting all the perl system variables and double clicking on the supplied !Perl appeared to sort this out, though it was a bit of a lucky guess as to what was causing the problem.

The Builder application only offers a Build and ROOL.BuildEnv environments, so I was unable to build any of the modules or applications in the sources download. Or is there something I need to do to get these to appear?

I can build with the ROOL.BuildEnv environment sucessfully (I think).

Error cannot open component database file 'ADFS::HardDisc4.$.RISCOS.BuildSys.Components.Build'.

I wasn’t sure where to post this on the website, so I apologise if this is the wrong forum.

Steve’s the build system expert, but you’ve already noticed one gotcha – the crusty old Perl scripts require the specific, rather ancient version of Perl included in the build environment. If anyone’s feeling like updating them to work with a modern !Perl distribution then we’d love to hear from you.

I don’t think we’ve done a proper set of components/products files for !Builder in this release – not enough time and besides, there isn’t a coherent larger scale project to build yet anyway. To build individual components, go into their source directories and run the !Mk / !MkRAM / !MkROM / !MkInstall scripts.

I’m working on documentation which will help you through the process of using the stuff which was released in Batch One (19th May). Keep an eye on our wiki page documentation.

Unset Alias$Perl
Unset Perl$Dir

A couple more things cropped up which are easy enough to fix: Firstly when attempting to build Sources.Programmer.RTSupport, it appears to need at least “Global/NewErrors.h” (to define ‘ErrorBase_RT’) and “Hdr:PublicWS”, “Hdr:NdrDebug”

AMU: failed to read time stamp for 'MemCheck:h.MemCheck'

Yes. We didn’t have time to go through every component ensuring that we’d released every dependency (hence all the comments about the BBE being incomplete). So, if you find a component which doesn’t build for reasons like that, I’m afraid it’s because we’ve not got everything which it requires released yet. Only time will improve this situation.

However, it’s still worth you reporting this stuff to us because it help us to prioritise the things which are needed in order to just build what went into the Batch One release.

In that case, Memcheck:h.MemCheck when trying to build Networking.Fetchers.Finger, Generic, Gopher and WhoIs. Also some of the scripts create directories with names like o/Tungsten and then o/Tungsten/Messages. This is obviously trying to create Directories and Sub-Directories, as the build then fails when trying to access them. If you manualy add the directories then it works fine.

Tank

The latter one sounds like it might be that you have a version of “mkdir” earlier on your run path which doesn’t support the -p (recursive) switch. Although I’m not certain. Check that doing a:

mkdir -p $.a.test.dir

is working correctly.

Yes, that seems to be the case as that command doesn’t work, unless the a and a.test directories are created first.

Right. You need to find out where the mkdir command (or alias) is that’s getting in the way. Open a task window and type:

show alias$mkdir

If that returns anything, remove the alias with:

unset alias$mkdir

If that’s not the problem, type this into the task window (I’m actually embarrassed to write this; it’s so naff):

set tmp$var run:mkdir
canonical tmp$var
show tmp$var

which should tell you where the mkdir utility is located. If it’s not the on in RiscOS.Library.UNIX, then that’s your problem. If it is, there is something odd going on (because mkdir has worked fine in RISC OS builds for quite a while now).

Now, why on Earth can’t I do something like:

Locate mkdir

??

I wrote a little BASIC ‘which’ utility which does that: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j-peacock/download/which.zip

I just wrote it in code mode in a Zap window. Took about a minute and is a massive 48 bytes. Nice. I think I’ll add a command to do that to the BootCommands module – the home of the random *command.

I did a find on various directories and found 5 different locations with mkdir. The one that was being used was from the !Fileutils package that is from the !RiscPkg project. in my haste I deleted all but the latest timestamped version which still fails. also I had already deleted the tarball downloads, so I don’t have the version supplied with the source. A search for a version by Google only gets me non working versions !! Obviously I don’t want to download again and waste your bandwidth and as it is only a small inconvenience, I’ll live with it for now. Thanks for the help

Tank

Send me a mail to srevill@riscosopen.org and I’ll email it to you. Pop it back into RiscOS.Library.UNIX and you should be sorted.