GNOME_COMPILE_WARNINGS(maximum) – Syntax Error in configure

I’m still encountering migration issues from Gentoo to Ubuntu. Apperantly, Gentoo is much more user friendly than Ubuntu when it comes to compiling packages. In Gentoo you’ve got almost all the major dependencies you need. In Ubuntu, on the other hand, you need to hunt them down. It’s much easier with the main ones, as they are listed. But there are some small ones which are harder to track. I came across the following error while trying to compile gitg, a GUI for Git, today:

./configure: line 14447: syntax error near unexpected token `maximum'
./configure: line 14447: `GNOME_COMPILE_WARNINGS(maximum)'

After not so short investigation I found out I was missing gnome-common

sudo apt-get install gnome-common

Why can’t be one distribution which is user-friendly like Ubuntu and in the same time developer-friendly like Gentoo?

4 thoughts on “GNOME_COMPILE_WARNINGS(maximum) – Syntax Error in configure”

  1. Actually it is quite simple.

    There is an option for apt-get: build-dep downloads build dependencies for a package. So if you can just call

    sudo apt-get build-dep gitg

    Of course it works for “source packages”

  2. Hi,
    thanks a lot for the tip with gnome-common. This deleted one of my errors in compiling a programm in Ubuntu.
    In synaptic i saw that gnome-common was also not installed on my system. So i installed it and ran make. Nothing. Same error.
    Well i restarted my computer. Nothing. Same.
    I started to think. I’ve read a lot of documents till now about the GNU Build System so maybe the whole reconfiguration process also had be to be restarted. And yesss that was it: I started autoreconf.

    From the Autoconf-Manual:
    “autoreconf runs autoconf, autoheader, aclocal, automake, libtoolize, and autopoint (when appropriate) repeatedly to update the GNU Build System in the specified directories and their subdirectories (see Subdirectories).”

    After that i tried again make and the error was gone. Well at least this error until make ended with the next but this is another story. 😉

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