There is no configure script in the source

[danemacmillan]

The Readme.md states this:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

There is no configure script in the source.

[cometsong]

That should be modified in the Readme.md, as it is not normally required, or it should be created and included in the dist.
I had to edit the Makefile for the system I was installing this on, so I agree an actual configure script to do so will be very helpful instead.

[BarbzYHOOL]

so what is the solution??? you could post it seriously -_-

[rubenvarela]

@BarbzYHOOL did you try make and make install?

Like @cometsong said, it's usually not needed. Since it's not included, if you need to change something, you can modify the Makefile directly.

[BarbzYHOOL]

I could as well write the entire tool myself if I knew how :P

Yes I tried these and I don't think it did anything but I had an older version of symlinks installed it seems so I don't need to find how anyway

[rubenvarela]

@BarbzYHOOL
This tool works as is. The original issue here or the reply by cometsong are about something else.

In your case, the provided Makefile, when you run make and make install if there are no errors, it will be compile the tool and it will be installed at,

/usr/local/bin

If you run which symlinks afterwards and it doesn't return /usr/local/bin/symlinks, it's not detecting this one and it's using the one at the path shown. You can either alter your PATH variable so this one comes after or uninstall the one at the other location.

[BarbzYHOOL]

which symlinks
/usr/bin/symlinks

And yes, no symlinks in /usr/local/bin

make and make install don't work at all as I said

[rubenvarela]

@BarbzYHOOL
Could you create an issue with both commands and their outputs? Also include the OS you're using? I can take a look, see if I or someone else can replicate and maybe submit a fix for it.

[BarbzYHOOL]

Hmmm, finally I'm not sure if it's working or not

make                                                                                                                                     
gcc -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O2  -o symlinks symlinks.c

I probably stopped there and did not "make install" because it's the first time I see only one line after make

I again stopped there now because I don't think I need to overwrite my working symlinks (if not broken, don't fix it)

[rubenvarela]

I again stopped there now because I don't think I need to overwrite my working symlinks (if not broken, don't fix it)

Sounds good.

For reference, that is the working output.

If you compare both outputs of ls, after make, you now have a symlinks file (red). If I execute it, ./symlinks, you get the help of the tool (what's expected if nothing else is passed to it).

A lot of the usual output of make is mainly what gcc shows. In this case, it doesn't have any warnings, errors or anything else to show. It compiles cleanly.

[BarbzYHOOL]

Ok then I can use it as is

Thanks

[LandisTwo]

I'm running openSuSE and like everyone else, I had no configure script in cloned repo.
i ran 'make' and it made : )
make install failed.
copied made 'symlinks' executable to /usr/bin
all was good with my remote server.

What I'm saying is; on opensuse at least, the configuration script configure nor editing Makefile was needed.

Landis.

[ernstki]

make install most likely fails because (as far as I know) /usr/local/bin is not writable by non-admin users on most Linux distributions, as well as macOS. If you were to instead run sudo make install it would probably work for you.

With all due respect to everyone involved—because I didn't always know the answers to these questions either—basically every problem described here can be fixed with a couple of lines in the README. The practice of doing make followed by sudo make install is pretty standard, and after you've seen that once or twice, you're like, oh, OK, right.

A configure script in the GNU Autotools sense is probably overkill for a tiny project with one C source file and one man page, and no weird library dependencies. You would end up with more Autotools-related code than actual code. Granted the Makefile should probably allow make install PREFIX=/some/weird/path for parity with ./configure --prefix=/some/weird/path, and that's probably 100% of what anyone would expect configure to do anyway.

I think this issue could be closed after the README gets updated, and I'm going to do a pull request for that right now.