Compiling, portability, dependencies, and testing

Prebuilt executables

Please see https://github.com/johnkerl/miller/releases where there are builds for OSX Yosemite, Linux i686 (statically linked), and Linux x86-64 (dynamically linked).

Homebrew installation support for OSX is available via brew update && brew install miller.

You may already have mlr available in your platform’s package manager on NetBSD, Debian Linux, Arch Linux, or perhaps other distributions.

Building from source

From release tarball using autoconfig

Miller allows you the option of using GNU autoconfigure to build portably.

From git clone using autoconfig

  • Install the following packages using your system’s package manager (apt-get, yum install, etc.): automake autoconf libtool flex
  • git clone https://github.com/johnkerl/miller
  • cd miller
  • autoreconf -fiv
  • Then continue from ./configure as above.

Creating a release tarball

  • Proceed from git-clone as above.
  • Then edit the package version at the top of configure.ac as well as c/mlrvers.h.
  • Then make distcheck.

Without using autoconfig

GNU autoconfig is familiar to many users, and indeed plenty of folks won’t bother to use an open-source software package which doesn’t have autoconfig support. And this is for good reason: GNU autoconfig allows us to build software on a wide diversity of platforms. For this reason I’m happy that Miller supports autoconfig.

But, many others (myself included!) find autoconfig confusing: if it works without errors, great, but if not, the ./configure && make output can be exceedingly difficult to decipher. And this also can be a turn-off for using open-source software: if you can’t figure out the build errors, you may just keep walking. For this reason I’m happy that Miller allows you to build without autoconfig. (Of course, if you have any build errors, feel free to contact me at kerl.john.r+miller@gmail.com, — or, better, open an issue with “New Issue” at https://github.com/johnkerl/miller/issues.)

Steps:

  • Obtain a release tarball or git clone.
  • cd into the c subdirectory.
  • Edit the INSTALLDIR in Makefile.no-autoconfig.
  • To change the C compiler, edit the CC= lines in Makefile.no-autoconfig and dsls/Makefile.no-autoconfig.
  • make -f Makefile.no-autoconfig creates the mlr executable and runs unit/regression tests (i.e. the equivalent of both make and make check using autoconfig).
  • make install copies the mlr executable to your install directory.

The Makefile.no-autoconfig is simple: little more than gcc *.c. Customzing is less automatic than autoconfig, but more transparent. I expect this makefile to work with few modifications on a large fraction of modern Linux/BSD-like systems: I’m aware of successful use with gcc and clang, on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, SELinux, Darwin (MacOS Yosemite), and FreeBSD.

In case of problems

If you have any build errors, feel free to contact me at kerl.john.r+miller@gmail.com, — or, better, open an issue with “New Issue” at https://github.com/johnkerl/miller/issues.

Dependencies

Required external dependencies

These are necessary to produce the mlr executable.

  • gcc, clang, etc. (or presumably other compilers; please open an issue or send me a pull request if you have information for me about other 21st-century compilers)
  • The standard C library
  • flex
  • automake, autoconf, and libtool, if you build with autoconfig

Optional external dependencies

This documentation pageset is built using Poki:
docs here, source code here. Note that http://johnkerl.org/miller/doc/index.html is nothing more than Miller’s doc directory served up by a web server. You’ll need poki if you modify documents, or if you modify the code in a way that affects the documents (there are auto-run snippets inserted into the doc). The best way to discover this is to run make install as above, then run poki in Miller’s doc subdirectory, then run git diff to see if docs were affected by the code mod. (If so, commit and push them.)

Internal dependencies

These are included within the
Miller source tree and do not need to be separately installed (and in fact any separate installation will not be picked up in the Miller build):

License

Two-clause BSD license https://github.com/johnkerl/miller/blob/master/LICENSE.txt.