Recently, in order to replace a very old, slow, and in some ways unreliable
machine as my main desktop machine at home, I acquired a new PC and
installed fedora 32 + xfce.
After various problems, I managed to get Fedora 32 working and in order to
speed up everything else I used a version of the ctwm executable built on
the old machine copied from the old machine, and likewise the poplog editor
ved -- to enable me to get my normal running and editing environments
going, instead of being stuck with nano or vi and the default xfce window
manager -- none of which I like.
I tried title bars but they were too thick, so I disabled them, and used
alternatives for moving, killing and resizing windows as reported recently.
After some time I decided to rebuild ctwm for the new machine, using the
latest sources.
So I created a new ctwm installation using bzr, copying instructions from
the website. It worked but the process was dreadful: repeatedly crashing
during 'make' because something was not installed.
In each case, I saved the error message about a missing package and used
'dnf install' to install it, which in most cases also installed several
other required packages.
I then typed 'make' again, waiting for the next stream of error messages!
Eventually, after several cycles of 'make; and 'dnf install' the whole
process worked without errors, and I now have a freshly built, up to date,
ctwm for fedora 32, doing what I want (including the latest man file).
Is it possible to change the bzr package so that it checks for required
packages and if they are not available installs them?
Failing that could it print out a list of required packages after
installing the local directory tree?
I am sure that many people unfamiliar with ctwm who might have been tempted
to try using it would have given up after make had failed one or more
times.
Question: is it possible for some knowledgable person to work out what ALL
the prerequisites are for construction of a standard ctwm to be achieved by
a single make command instead of all that painful hassle.
I have just found a record of dnf calls starting with 'install bzr' in
/var/log/dnf.log.1,
which I hope is sufficient to meet all requirements:
Here is the sequence:
2020-08-20T10:32:00Z DDEBUG Command: dnf install bzr
2020-08-20T10:43:17Z DDEBUG Command: dnf install cmake
2020-08-20T10:44:45Z DDEBUG Command: dnf install xpm
2020-08-20T10:46:26Z DDEBUG Command: dnf install libXpm-devel
2020-08-20T10:48:03Z DDEBUG Command: dnf install libXrandr-devel
2020-08-20T10:49:01Z DDEBUG Command: dnf install flex
2020-08-20T10:49:50Z DDEBUG Command: dnf install bison-devel
2020-08-20T10:50:05Z DDEBUG Command: dnf install bison
Each of those triggered other installations to meet requirements.
With partially successful calls of 'make' in between all the install
commands, I think the whole process took 20-30 minutes (on a 200mbps
download internet connection) and a fast new intel i5 cpu.
Of course most ctwm users will not have had this problem recently because
when they install and build a new version of ctwm they already have all the
prerequisite libraries previously installed (including me when I next
update!).
Is it possible to configure bzr to produce make files that install all the
prerequisites?
Alternatively could it print out the above list of required packages after
downloading everything into the new ctwm directory tree?
Anyhow I am now very pleased to have ctwm 4.0.3-post working as expected,
invoked by the XFCE login process.
My thanks to all concerned.
Aaron
