Re: Help wanted: just run gxditview on your system and click

[Robert Goulding]

OK, I managed to compile gxditview. Left-clicking brings up the menu; none
of the items are selectable.

And I figured out the "ln -s" problem. I downloaded the tarball into my
Downloads folder, which is a mounted filesystem from the point of view of
the Linux container. And "ln -s" always fails in mounted filesystems. Once
I built it in my home directory, there was no longer an error.

On Thu, Jul 27, 2023 at 12:11 PM G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Robert,
>
> At 2023-07-27T11:54:13-0400, Robert Goulding wrote:
> > I tried to do this, but gxditview was not on my system (Crostini on a
> > Chromebook = Debian 11 (bullseye).
>
> On a Debian box, make sure you have the "groff" package installed, not
> just "groff-base".
>
> > So I compiled again from source, making sure --with-x was added to
> > configure -- but although the configure output said that x libraries
> > were found, gxditview was not built.
>
> Not a surprise; it has dependencies that few people install anymore.
>
> > One other little glitch: the configure script said that "ln -s" does
> > not work, so the Makefile tried to use "ln" - which caused an error
> > when I tried to build. I had to manually amend the Makefile to use "ln
> > -s" instead.
>
> That _is_ a surprise, and it's hard for me to imagine that the relevant
> configure check (`AC_PROG_LN_S`)[1] would fail on _any_ Debian system.
>
> Here's the test, which I snarfed out of a config.status file on my
> system.  It looks pretty straightfoward to me (but I've been reading
> Bourne scripts for many years).
>
> If you want to chase this, you might try some of these commands at your
> shell prompt and see what fails.
>
> rm -f conf$$ conf$$.exe conf$$.file
> if test -d conf$$.dir; then
>   rm -f conf$$.dir/conf$$.file
> else
>   rm -f conf$$.dir
>   mkdir conf$$.dir 2>/dev/null
> fi
> if (echo >conf$$.file) 2>/dev/null; then
>   if ln -s conf$$.file conf$$ 2>/dev/null; then
>     as_ln_s='ln -s'
>     # ... but there are two gotchas:
>     # 1) On MSYS, both `ln -s file dir' and `ln file dir' fail.
>     # 2) DJGPP < 2.04 has no symlinks; `ln -s' creates a wrapper
> executable.
>     # In both cases, we have to default to `cp -pR'.
>     ln -s conf$$.file conf$$.dir 2>/dev/null && test ! -f conf$$.exe ||
>       as_ln_s='cp -pR'
>   elif ln conf$$.file conf$$ 2>/dev/null; then
>     as_ln_s=ln
>   else
>     as_ln_s='cp -pR'
>   fi
> else
>   as_ln_s='cp -pR'
> fi
> rm -f conf$$ conf$$.exe conf$$.dir/conf$$.file conf$$.file
> rmdir conf$$.dir 2>/dev/null
>
> Regards,
> Branden
>
> [1]
> https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/Particular-Programs.html
>


-- 
Robert Goulding
Director, John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values;
Assoc. Professor, Program of Liberal Studies,
Fellow, Medieval Institute,
University of Notre Dame.