February 08, 2003

Compile, Dammit, COMPILE!

Sadly, I'm not even referring to my own code in this situation, though I have felt this same way when doing my own programming as well. But no, this has nothing to do with me at all. I just wanted to reinstall PostgreSQL because the latest port had come out and it was recommended that updates be made. So I went to the ports section, and tried to just type the usual make install clean, but then it gave me some dumbass bug about how gettext was already installed, so I would have to force a re-register or make deinstall. Fine, I went to the port directory for gettext and uninstalled it (what do I care about international support, anyway, right?).

Having done that, the compilation of Postgres went a bit farther, but then failed, saying that I needed intl.4, a library that gettext comes with. BUT IT DOESN'T. Just to make sure, I reinstalled gettext, but there was no library intl.4 anywhere on my system at all. So I go to the web, and realize that this dumbass problem was happening with others, who were trying to install some UPS thing from the ports. I didn't know what the hell to do, so I poked around the Makefile, and read that there was an option to not install gettext at all, which after going to GNU Make's website and figuring out how to pass arguments to a makefile, I finally got Postgres compiled and installed. Then there was the challenge of creating myself as a user again, and creating the tables I needed. However, FINALLY, I have everything working (I hope—haven't tried DBI yet), but it definitely could have been a lot easier, if the goddamn port had just compiled in the first place!