[Gretl-devel] Installing gretl on Mandriva
I have been experimenting with Mandriva and attempted to install
gretl. The version in the repository is 1.6.5, so I started from the
source. This turned out to be quite frustrating because the standard
Mandriva installation omits almost everything necessary for standard
development - it does not even include the make program! So, for
anyone wanting to do this, you will have to install a large number of
development libraries.
However, the reason for this message is that there appears to be a
bug in the linking of the lreadline library (required for the
readline cli). The bug is that lreadline is unable to locate
external references in the ncurses libraries (which must also be
installed). According to my investigations the problem is known; it
is said to have persisted through several releases of Mandriva and
may affect other Mandriva-derived distributions. It can be remedied
by explicit reference to the lcurses library in the configuration
script file. Since this appears to be harmless under other systems,
you might consider making the change in this file.
The following line appears once or twice:
LIBS="-lreadline $termcap_lib $LIBS"
where $termcap_lib takes the value "-lncurses" if ncurses is
installed. I edited the line as follows:
LIBS="-lreadline -lcurses $termcap_lib $LIBS"
and this appears to get round the bug in Mandriva's linking of
lreadline. I had ensured that lcurses is installed on my system, so
it may be best to test for lcurses and include the library via a
variable similar to $termcap_lib.
Gordon